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The Romans, Jones pointed out, called a man in love salax, in a salted state, which is the origin of the word salacious.
Salt is a chemical term for a substance produced by the reaction of an acid with a base.
An adult human being contains about 250 grams of salt, which would fill three or four salt-shakers, but is constantly losing it through bodily functions.
The Book of Ezekial mentions rubbing newborn infants with salt to protect them from evil.
In the most authoritative book of Jewish law, the Shulchan Arukh, The Prepared Table, written in the sixteenth century, it is explained that salt can only safely be handled with the middle two fingers. If a man uses his thumb in serving salt, his children will die, his little finger will cause poverty, and use of the index finger will cause him to become a murderer.
“Why must Your Majesty use the word profit? All I am concerned with are the good and the right. If Your Majesty says, ‘How can I profit my state?’ your officials will say, ‘How can I profit my family?’ and officers and common people will say, ‘How can I profit myself?’ Once superiors and inferiors are competing for profit, the state will be in danger.”
“There is no better food than salted vegetables” are words written on an ancient papyrus.
In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.
In ancient Taghaza, salt was quarried from the near surface in 200-pound blocks loaded on camels, one block on each side.
It is a sad fate for a people to be defined for posterity by their enemies.
It is likely that among the Celtic contributions to Western culture are the first salt-cured hams.
The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.”
THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.
Porky Marcus’s recipe for mothproof ham was an attempt to produce a Westphalia-type product. The addition of oil and vinegar was intended to reproduce the savage taste of the wild north.
But it seems even in the first century, a rabbinical certification brought a better price.
The Latin word for a wooden cheese mold, forma,
In Parma, a ten-year prison sentence could be reduced to five years as a galley slave on a Genoese ship. But most of these slaves lived only two years, which caused a constant need for replacements.
“Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese.”
It was considered rude, sometimes even unlucky, to touch salt with the fingers.
Cato suggested that women would live long, healthy lives if they washed their genitals in the urine of a cabbage eater.
Asked how to recognize a heretic from a true believer, one crusader, according to legend, said, “Kill them all. God knows his own.”
Centuries ago it was realized that the slides could be fun. A miner at the top and five or six guests, all hugging each other, slid down as if they were in a roller coaster car.
Horses that were brought in to work the mines spent their entire lives below ground.
In 1830, the Wieliczka Salt Mine Band, which still performs, was started because of the quality of the acoustics in the mine.
Anglo Saxons called a saltworks a wich, and any place in England where the name ends in “wich” at one time produced salt.
A 1305 recipe from the estate of the bishop of Winchester called for a pound of salt to be added for every ten pounds of butter.
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.
Many English condiments, even Worcestershire sauce, invented in the 1840s, are based on Asian ideas.
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.
Already in 1804 he had observed, employing the term used for tomatoes in the United States at the time, that “love apples” make “a fine catsup.”
The girl chosen to represent Vixtociatl danced for ten days with women who had made salt. Finally, on the festival day, two slaves were killed, and then the girl too was sacrificed.
But the Pilgrims had no idea how to make it, and for that matter, they didn’t know how to catch fish either.
When these early settlers hunted, they would leave red herring along their trail because the strong smell would confuse wolves, which is the origin of the expression red herring, meaning “a false trail.”
One of the gabelle’s most irritating inventions was the sel du devoir, the salt duty. Every person in the Grande Gabelle over the age of eight was required to purchase seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of salt each year at a fixed high government price. This was far more salt than could possibly be used, unless it was for making salt fish, sausages, hams, and other salt-cured goods. But using the sel du devoir to make salted products was illegal, and, if caught, the perpetrator would be charged with the crime of faux saunage, salt fraud, which carried severe penalties.
A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial.
“It was so desolate it would make an owl weep to fly over it.”
By 1860, the United States had become a huge salt consumer, Americans using far more salt per capita than Europeans.
The Union learned a lesson from this: In the future, when they captured saltworks, they destroyed them.
TO KEEP MEAT FROM SPOILING IN SUMMER Eat it early in the Spring.—Confederate States Almanac, Macon, Georgia, 1865
Eventually, to the relief of the miners, Esche gave up on the camels and released them in the Nevada desert to thrive on their own. Since no camel colony has ever been discovered there, it is assumed they all died, probably a slow, pitiful death.
IN THE SPRING, seawater was pumped into the ponds of the south bay. Through the summer, the brine would be moved; by late summer, it was dense enough to crystallize. The brine turned pink and then a dark brick color. Today, when people fly into San Francisco, they sometimes gaze out the window and wonder about the pink-and-brown geometric ponds at the end of the bay.
Whatever the cause, the simple observable fact, as Denis Diderot pointed out in his eighteenth-century encyclopedia, is that “you know the salt is forming when the water turns red.”
The San Francisco Bay salt makers of the silver rush days believed the dark red color came from insects in the brine. Only in modern times has it been understood that dunaliella is green, but once the brine reaches a certain level of salinity, it turns red. In addition, tiny, barely visible shrimp, brine shrimp, live in the brine at this density.
Today, the saltworks of San Francisco Bay sell their reddish little creatures to other saltworks that wish to improve their evaporation process.
Davy’s work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.
As early as the sixteenth century, nitrates were used in cured meats to make them a reddish color, that was thought to be more in keeping with the natural color of meat.
The nitrate turns to nitrite, which reacts with a protein in the meat called myoglobin, producing a pinkish color. The reaction also produces minuscule amounts of something called nitrosamines, which may be cancer-causing. Today, the amount of nitrates is limited by law to what seems to have been deemed an acceptable risk for the oddly unquestioned goal of making ham reddish.
He isolated a salt, magnesium sulphate, ever after known as Epsom salt. Epsom salt is now used not only medicinally but in the textile industry, for explosives, in match heads, and in fireproofing.
