Salt: A World History

by Mark Kurlansky

In the Middle Ages, yellow flowers of various species were salted and kept in earthen pots and beaten to extract a juice to color butter that had lost its carotene. Later, after Columbus’s voyages, annatto seeds were used. These seeds are still used by large American dairies, not to conceal rancid butter but because they believe the consumer wants a consistent dark yellow color.

Determined to make butter more than a luxury for a rural elite, northern Europeans consistently tried to preserve it in salt. But getting good, properly preserved butter remained a problem until refrigeration was invented.

Cheshire, not surprisingly for a place with both dairy herds and saltworks, produced a great deal of cheese. Cheshire is the oldest known variety of English cheese and is thought to be more representative of a medieval English cheese than is cheddar or the blue-veined Stilton.

In eighteenth-century England, anchovy sauce became known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup.

Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan.

Why would English garum have an Indonesian name? Because the English, starting with the medieval spice trade, looked to Asia for seasoning. Many English condiments, even Worcestershire sauce, invented in the 1840s, are based on Asian ideas.

The salt in ketchup originally came from salt-cured fish, and most early anchovy ketchup recipes, such as Eliza Smith’s, do not even list salt as an ingredient because it is part of the anchovies. But the English and Americans began to move away from having fish in their ketchup. It became a mushroom sauce, a walnut sauce, or even a salted lemon sauce.

Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called “tomato ketchup” in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North.

Mease said that the condiment was frequently used by the French. The French have never been known for their fondness for tomato ketchup, so it is thought, given the date, that the French he was referring to, were planter refugees from the Haitian revolution.

If a Chinese salt producer had gone to Cheshire in the 1500s, he would have been appalled by the primitiveness of the technology. Shirtless men climbed down ladders into the pits, filled leather buckets with brine, and climbed out to dump the brine in wooden troughs. Then a web of pipes and gutters channeled the brine to the many salt makers in the area. But by 1636, an account of a visit to the wiches mentioned that pumps had just been installed in Nantwich to raise the brine.

England experienced an extremely favorable shift in climate that allowed longer growing seasons and cheaper food. With food prices lowered, many English farms failed. Failed farms in turn created a workforce for industry.

Starting with Jethro Tull’s seed-planting drill of 1701, which planted three rows at once, a new agricultural invention, a new crossbred plant, a new strain of livestock, or a new tool was invented almost every year in eighteenth-century Britain.

Hauling coal to Cheshire became a major expense of salt production. Salt makers began to wonder if there might not be coal underneath Cheshire. They were surrounded by coal regions. In Whitehaven, not far north of them in Cumberland, and farther up near Glasgow at the mouth of the Clyde, salt was made and sold at a much lower price than Cheshire’s product because these saltworks had their own coal fields.

The Cheshire salt producers went coal prospecting. In 1670, John Jackson prospected for coal on the estate of William Marbury near Northwich and, at a depth of only 105 feet, found a bed of solid rock salt and no coal at all.

Rock salt did not need fuel, but the immediate reaction of the Cheshire brine boilers was to lobby parliament for a bill banning the mining of rock salt. They believed that the discovery would change the nature of Cheshire, that the small-scale entrepreneur with a modest investment in a well and some lead pans would be pushed out by large and well-capitalized mining companies.

By the end of the century, salt refineries were being established along the Mersey, and a salt warehouse was built on the Liverpool docks. Coal from south Lancashire on the opposite bank of the Mersey could be transported cheaply by barge. The salt industry, the coal industry, and the port of Liverpool fed off of each other and together grew prosperous.

adding Scotland meant bringing Scottish salt into England, and Cheshire merchants had added to the treaty of union numerous stipulations on salt production and pricing aimed at preventing Scottish salt from competing with Cheshire. This was one of several reasons the union had an acrimonious beginning.

Meanwhile, Cheshire salt makers would not give up on the idea that the coal beds around them extended to their region. As late as 1899, they drilled a shaft a mile deep. But again, they found only salt.

EVEN BEFORE TRUE industrialization had overtaken England, the industrial degradation of the environment was an accepted way of life in Cheshire.

The forests of Cheshire had been chopped down to fuel furnaces. Barren white scars were etched into the pastureland, where the pan scale, the residue that had to be periodically chipped off the salt pans, was dumped. And the earth itself was beginning to collapse.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was a recurring topic of concern, especially since much of the foreign salt came from England’s principal enemy, France. On land campaigns, each British soldier received a huge ration of salt so that he could acquire fresh meat along his march and salt it to use as needed. The British navy was provisioned with salt and salt foods. Salt was strategic, like gunpowder, which was also made from salt.

STUDYING A ROAD map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt.

Animals get the salt they need by finding brine springs, brackish water, rock salt, any natural salt available for licking. The licks, found throughout the continent, were often a flat area of several acres of barren, whitish brown or whitish gray earth.

The lick at the end of the road, because it had a salt supply, was a suitable place for a settlement. Villages were built at the licks. A salt lick near Lake Erie had a wide road made by buffalo, a...

Hunter groups that did not farm did not make salt. An exception was the Bering Strait Eskimo, who took reindeer, mountain sheep, bear, seal, walrus, and other game and boiled it in seawater to give a salty taste.

The Puget Sound Indians, whose diet was largely salmon, were said to eat no salt. The Mohegan of Connecticut ate great quantities of lobster, clams, shad, lamprey, and also corn, but, according to Cotton Mather, “They had not a grain of salt in the world until we bestowed it on them.”

Many indigenous North American cultures have a salt deity, almost always female. For the Navajo, it is an elderly woman. Among agricultural people of the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, expeditions to gather salt were often initiated with great ceremonies.

THE HISTORY OF the Americas is one of constant warfare over salt. Whoever controlled salt was in power. This was true before Europeans arrived, and it continued to be the reality until after the American Civil War.

The Incas were salt producers, with salt wells just outside Cuzco. In Colombia, nomadic tribesmen probably first built permanent settlements because they needed salt and learned how to make it. Their society was organized around natural brine springs. The Chibcha, a highland tribe living in the area that was to become the modern capital of Bogotá, became a dominant group because they were the best salt makers. In yet another example of the association between sex and salt for twentieth-century psychologists to ponder, the Chibcha salt lords honored the gods two times a year by abstaining from sex and salt.

The Aztecs controlled the salt routes by military power and were able to deny their enemies, such as Tlxalacaltecas, access to salt.

The Spanish took power by taking over the saltworks of the indigenous people they conquered. Cortés, who came from southern Spain, not far from both Spanish and Portuguese saltworks, understood the power and politics of salt.

THE EARLIEST EVIDENCE that has been found of Mayan salt production is dated at about 1000 B.C., but remains of earlier saltworks have been found in non-Mayan Mexico such as Oaxaca.

When Hernán Cortés first went to the Yucatán peninsula in the early sixteenth century, he found a Mayan people with a large salt industry and an extensive trade not only in salt but in salted goods such as salt fish and cured hides.

In the Yucatán, salt was made from solar evaporation at least 2,000 years ago, meaning that indigenous Americans have been making solar-evaporated sea salt for at least as long as have Europeans. The Mayans also knew how to extract salt from plants, although plant salt is usually potassium chloride rather than sodium chloride.

Typical of the cultural destruction of Chiapas Mayans, the town of La Concordia and its surrounding saltworks were flooded by a dam in the 1970s and now rest on the bottom of a lake. According to Frans Blom, the Danish anthropologist who explored Mayan culture in the 1920s through the 1940s, the site contained the unique saltworks of the Mayan highlands, where brine was diverted from springs by the use of tree trunks into shallow stone pans for solar evaporation, similar to the Hawaiian technique using stone bowls.

THE ARRIVAL OF the Spanish meant not only a new power controlling the salt but a huge increase in demand for industrial salt. The Spanish introduced herds of cattle that needed to be fed salt and whose hides were cured with salt in a prosperous leather industry. Obsessed with the extraction of precious metals, the Spanish invented the patio process for silver mining in mid-sixteenth-century Mexico. In this process, silver was separated from ore by using salt because the sodium in the salt extracted impurities. Silver mining by the patio process required huge quantities of salt, and the Spanish built large-scale saltworks adjacent to silver mines.

Cuba, a Spanish colony, should have been a Spanish market. But a time came in the nineteenth century, with the wild fluctuation of salt prices, when Yucatán salt was imported to England through the port of Liverpool.

THE BRITISH FIRST arrived in North America in the north, at Newfoundland, and they took cod. They next arrived in the south, the Caribbean, where they took salt, which they needed for the cod.

The Portuguese alliance gained England access to the Cape Verde Islands, where British ships could fill their holds with sea salt on their way across the Atlantic. The islands on the eastern side of the archipelago, Maio, Boa Vista, and Sal, which means “salt,” had marshes with strong brine, and in the seventeenth century Portugal granted the British exclusive use of the salt marshes of Maio and Boa Vista.

IN THE SEVENTEENTH and eighteenth centuries, while European powers were fighting bitterly for Caribbean islands on which to grow sugarcane, northern Europeans—the English, the Dutch, the Swedish, and the Danes—also looked for islands with inland salt marshes like the Cape Verde Islands.

in the Americas, the Dutch could come ashore unobserved on the coast of Venezuela at Araya, a hot and desolate eighty-mile lagoon, and steal Spanish salt from the beach, where Caribbean seawater evaporated into a thick white crust.

Sailors were not allowed to be armed when they came ashore, because if convoys of two nations arrived at the same time, a port scuffle could turn into a land war. English and Dutch sailors were especially hostile toward each other.

In the Caribbean, the leading cargo carried to North America—more tonnage than even sugar, molasses, or rum—was salt. The leading return cargo from North America to the Caribbean was salt cod, used to feed slaves on sugar plantations.

By 1673, the arrival of Bermudian rakers on Salt Cay was a regular event. Five years later, salt raking had become equally well organized on the slightly larger island to the north, Turk or Grand Turk Island, which was named after a native cactus thought to resemble a Turkish turban. But the Spanish would come in the winter and take the salt rakers’ tools and destroy their sheds.

These were the manor houses of slave plantations, but they had none of the elegance of the Virginia tobacco, or Alabama cotton, or West Indian sugar planters’ homes.

Yes that's the horrible thing here the lack of elegance.

All that these small, salt-making islands had was their location in shipping lanes, sunshine, and marshes that trapped seawater. Yet for a time they prospered because the British Empire needed salt.

THE ENGLISH, THE Dutch, and the French hunted for salt, the magic elixir that could turn their new American seas of limitless fish into limitless wealth.

And so he resolved to be a realist, though his trademark style could be seen in naming Cape Ann after a woman he had been fond of during his military service in Turkey. Back in England, it was renamed Cape Ann after Prince Charles’s mother.

In his list of twenty-five “excellent good harbors” for fishing, he completely ignored the best harbor on Cape Ann, which only nine years later would become the fishing station of Gloucester and eventually the leading cod port of New England.

The salt adviser tried to make bay salt in the French manner, digging evaporation ponds lined with clay. But New England weather was ill suited to this technique. According to Bradford, the salt maker was “an ignorant, foolish, self-willed fellow.”