Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  Roman government did not maintain a monopoly on salt sales as did the Chinese, but it did not hesitate to control salt prices when it seemed necessary. The earliest record of Roman government interference in salt prices was in 506 B.C., only three years before the kingdom was declared a republic. The state took over Rome’s premier source of salt, the private saltworks in Ostia, because the king regarded its prices as too high.

  Both under the republic and, later, the empire, Roman government periodically subsidized the price of salt to ensure that it was easily affordable for plebeians. It was a gift, like a tax cut, that government could bestow when in need of popular support. On the eve of Emperor Augustus’s decisive naval campaign defeating Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, Augustus garnered public support by distributing free olive oil and salt.

  But during the Punic Wars (264 to 146 B.C.), a century-long struggle-to-the-death for control of the Mediterranean with the Phoenician colony of Carthage, Rome manipulated salt prices to raise money for the war. In the fashion of the Chinese emperors, the Roman government declared an artificially high price for salt and put the profits at the disposal of the military. A low price was still maintained in the city of Rome, but elsewhere a charge was added in accordance with the distance from the nearest saltwork. This salt tax system was devised by Marcus Livius, a tribune, a government official representing plebeians. Because of his salt price scheme, he became known as the salinator, which later became the title of the official in the treasury who was responsible for decisions about salt prices.

  MOST ITALIAN CITIES were founded proximate to saltworks, starting with Rome in the hills behind the saltworks at the mouth of the Tiber. Those saltworks, along the northern bank, were controlled by Etruscans. In 640 B.C., the Romans, not wanting to be dependent on Etruscan salt, founded their own saltworks across the river in Ostia. They built a single, shallow pond to hold seawater until the sun evaporated it into salt crystals.

  The first of the great Roman roads, the Via Salaria, Salt Road, was built to bring this salt not only to Rome but across the interior of the peninsula. This worked well in the Roman part of the Italian peninsula. But as Rome expanded, transporting salt longer distances by road became too costly. Not only did Rome want salt to be affordable for the people, but, more importantly as the Romans became ambitious empire builders, they needed it to be available for the army. 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.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

  To the Romans, salt was a necessary part of empire building. They developed saltworks throughout their expanded world, establishing them on seashores, marshes, and brine springs throughout the Italian peninsula. By conquest they took over not only Hallstatt, Hallein, and the many Celtic works of Gaul and Britain but also the saltworks of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in North Africa, Sicily, Spain, and Portugal. They acquired Greek works and Black Sea works and ancient Middle Eastern works including the saltworks of Mount Sodom by the Dead Sea. More than sixty salt-works from the Roman Empire have been identified.

  Romans boiled sea salt in pottery, which they broke after a solid salt block had formed inside. Piles of pottery shards mark many ancient Roman sea salt sites throughout the Mediterranean. The Romans also pumped seawater into single ponds for solar evaporation, as in Ostia. They mined rock salt, scraped dry lake beds like African sebkhas, boiled the brine from marshes, and burned marsh plants to extract salt from the ashes.

  None of these techniques were Roman inventions. Aristotle had mentioned brine spring evaporation in the fourth century B.C. Hippocrates, the fifth-century-B.C. physician, seems to have known about solar-evaporated sea salt. He wrote,

  The sun attracts the finest and lightest part of the water and carries it high up; the saltiness remains because of its thickness and weight, and in this way the salt originates.

  The Roman genius was administration—not the originality of the project but the scale of the operation.

  THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted. The oldest surviving complete book of Latin prose, Cato’s second-century-B.C. practical guide to rural life, De agricultura, suggests eating cabbage this way:

  If you want your cabbage chopped, washed, dried, sprinkled with salt or vinegar, there is nothing healthier.

  Salt was served at the table, in a simple seashell at a plebeian’s table or in an ornate silver saltcellar at a patrician’s feast. In fact, since salt symbolized the binding of an agreement, the absence of a saltcellar on a banquet table would have been interpreted as an unfriendly act and reason for suspicion.

  Cato suggested testing brine for sufficient salinity to use in pickling by seeing if an anchovy or an egg would float in it. The anchovy test has not endured, but the egg test remains the standard household technique throughout the Mediterranean. In northern Europe a floating potato is sometimes used.

  Most of the salt consumed by Romans was already in their food when they bought it at the market. Salt was even added to wine in a spicy mixture called defrutum, which, in the absence of bottling corks, was used to preserve the wine. This may explain why their food was said to be extremely salty and yet the consumption of table salt was not remarkable. In the first century A.D., Pliny estimated that the average Roman citizen consumed only 25 grams of salt a day. The modern American consumes even less if the salt content of packaged food is not included.

  The Romans used a great deal of salt in the hams and other pork products that they seemed to have learned about from the Celts. Sausages—pork and other meats, preserved in salt, seasoned and stuffed in natural casings from intestines, bladders, or stomachs—were both imported from Gaul and made locally. The recipes for many of the French and Italian sausages of today date from Roman times.

  Originally, hams and sausages were brought to Rome from the conquered northern empire. According to Strabo, the well-traveled first-century-B.C. Greek historian, the most prized ham in Rome came from the forests of Burgundy. At the time those forests were Celtic, but the French, who have a habit of claiming Celtic history—they have made Vercingetorix a French national hero—insist that ham is a French invention, albeit from Celtic Gaul. But the Romans were importing ham from numerous Celtic regions, including what is present-day Germany. The hams of Westphalia, which were dried, salted, and then smoked with unique local woods—a recipe still followed today in Westphalia—were very popular with Romans.

  Cato, like many Romans, was a ham enthusiast. In fact, at a time when Romans often took family names from agriculture, Cato was called Marcus Porcius. 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.

  After buying legs of pork cut off the feet. ½ peck ground Roman salt per ham. Spread the salt in the base of a vat or jar, then place a ham with the skin facing downwards. Cover completely with salt. Then place another above it and cover in the same way. Be careful not to let meat touch meat. Cover them all in the same way. When all are arranged, cover the top with salt so that no meat is seen, and level it off.

  After standing in salt for five days, take all hams out with the salt. Put those that were above below, and so rearrange and replace. After a total of twelve days take out the hams, clean off all the salt and hang in the fresh air for two days. On the third day clean off with a sponge, rub all over with oil, hang in smoke for two days. On the third day take down, rub all over with a mixture of oil and vinegar and hang in the meat store. Neither moths nor worms will attack it.—Cato, De agricultura, second century b.c.

  OLIVES, PRESERVED IN salt, along with the older idea, crushed into oil, were staples of the Roman diet and a basic food of the working cla
ss. Patricians ate olives at the beginning of a meal. For plebeians, they were the meal. Cato listed his workers’ provisions as bread, olives, wine, and salt. Despite their hardness, olives must be handpicked because any bruising can be ruinous in the pickling process. Harvesting olives requires so much care that in ancient times it was believed that conditions were only auspicious for a successful harvest during the last quarter moon of each month.

  The bruised or damaged fruit was cured for the workers, but the successfully gathered olives were cured in a variety of ways for sale. Apicius, the great Roman food writer, mentioned an olive called columbades that was cured in seawater.

  The Romans preserved many vegetables in brine, sometimes with the addition of vinegar, including fennel, asparagus, and cabbage. Cato’s 2,200-year-old recipe, using repeated soakings to remove the oleuropeina, and then salt for lactic acid fermentation, is still one of the standard techniques. When he said “soaked sufficiently,” he neglected to mention that this takes days.

  How green olives are conserved.

  Before they turn black, they are to be broken and put into water. The water is to be changed frequently. When they have soaked sufficiently they are drained, put in vinegar, and oil is added. 1.2 pound salt to 1 peck olives. Fennel and lentisk [the seeds of the lentisk tree] are put up separately in vinegar. When you decide to mix them in, use quickly. Pack in preserving-jars. When you wish to use, take with dry hands.

  FISH WAS THE centerpiece of Roman cuisine. When salted, it was also at the heart of Roman commerce. The Greek physician Galen, who lived from A.D. 130 to 200, wrote about the Roman salt fish trade. Galen was the first to understand the significance of reading pulses, and his writings on health and diet were a major influence on medicine well into the Middle Ages. It was not a coincidence that a physician would be writing about salt fish since, like salt, it was considered both a food and a medicine.

  Galen described Rome’s ports busy with ships unloading salt fish from the eastern and western Mediterranean. He said that the best salt fish he knew was called sarda, but he also praised the tuna salted in Sardinia or in Gades, Spain, and salted mullet from the Black Sea. Sarda may refer to the small tuna now called bonito or Atlantic mackerel, or the sardine, a small young pilchard, which is a uniquely European fish. He also praised salt fish from Egypt and cured Spanish mackerel from the port of Sexi in southern Spain.

  By Galen’s time, the centuries-old trade in both salted fish and fermented salt fish sauce had been well established in the Mediterranean. It had even been a topic of physicians before. But what struck Galen in the second century was that never before in history had the trade been so extensive and on such a massive scale.

  IN 241 B.C., at the end of the Punic Wars, when Phoenician Carthage was crushed, Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean, came under Roman control. Sicily was known as the “breadbasket of Rome” for its grain. But it also had valuable fisheries. Catching, salt curing, and selling fish was the major activity of the entire Sicilian coastline, and the most famous fish throughout the Mediterranean was the salted bluefin tuna.

  The Sicilians made salt by boiling the seawater caught in the island’s many marshes. Excavations have revealed ancient salt-works concentrated in the western part of the island around Trapani and on the island of Favignana. Not coincidentally, these are the areas from which the bluefin tuna is fished.

  Archestratus, the Sicilian-born fourth-century-B.C. Greek poet and gourmet, praised his native island’s tuna, both fresh and salted, stored in jars. Normally when a tuna was caught, the choice upper body parts were eaten fresh, and the drier tail meat was reserved for salting. But Archestratus offered an interesting compromise.

  Take the tail of the female tuna—and I’m talking of the large female tuna whose mother city is Byzantium. Then slice it and bake all of it properly, simply sprinkling it lightly with salt and brushing with oil. Eat the slices hot, dipping them into a sharp brine. They are good if you want to eat them dry, like the immortal gods in form and stature. If you serve it sprinkled with vinegar, it will be ruined.—Archestratus, The Life of Luxury, fourth century b.c.

  Archestratus also admired the Black Sea tuna coming from Byzantium, the site of present-day Istanbul. These fish were from the same schools. The bluefin passes Sicily on its spawning journey to the Black Sea. In pre-Roman times, the Black Sea was a major fishing and salt fish area, especially for tuna, but also herring, sturgeon, flounder, mackerel, and anchovies. Herodotus singled out the salted sturgeon of what is now the Dnieper River, which flows through the Ukraine into the Black Sea.

  FROM THE BLACK Sea to the Strait of Gibraltar, salt production was usually placed near fishing areas, creating industrial zones that produced a range of salt-based products, including various types of salt fish, fish sauces, and purple dye.

  Salsamentum, from sal, salt, was the Roman word for salted products. The most commercially important salsamentum was salt fish. Whereas the Greeks had developed an entire vocabulary for salt fish, describing the type of cure, the place of origin, the cut of fish, salted with scales, or without scales, the Romans simply spoke of salsamentum, from which they made a good deal of money.

  After the producers made all of these salsamenta, the scraps—the innards, the gills, and the tails—were used to make sauce. Roman writings mention four classes of sauce: garum, liquamen, allec, and muria. The exact meaning of these terms has been lost. Allec may have been the leftover sludge after the sauce was strained. Garum and liquamen ended up being generic terms for fermented fish sauce.

  To make the sauce, the fish scraps were put in earthen jars with alternating layers of salt and weighted on the top to keep them submerged in the pickle that developed as salt drew moisture out of the fish. Classics scholars have searched for precise ancient garum recipes, but the clearest are medieval, from Geoponica, a Greek agricultural manual written about A.D. 900. It offered a number of garum recipes based on earlier sources:

  The so-called liquamen is made in this manner: the intestines of fish are thrown into a vessel and salted. Small fish, either the best smelt, or small mullet, or sprats, or wolffish, or whatever is deemed to be small, are all salted together and, shaken frequently, are fermented in the sun.

  After it has been reduced in the heat, garum is obtained from it in this way: a large, strong basket is placed into the vessel of the aforementioned fish, and the garum streams into the basket. In this way the so-called liquamen is strained through the basket when it is taken up. The remaining refuse is allec. . . .

  Next, if you wish to use the garum immediately, that is to say not ferment it in the sun, but to boil it, you do it this way. When the brine has been tested, so that an egg having been thrown in floats (if it sinks, it is not sufficiently salty), and throwing the fish into the brine in a newly-made earthenware pot and adding in some oregano, you place it on a sufficient fire until it is boiled, that is until it begins to reduce a little. Some throw in boiled-down must [unfermented wine]. Next, throwing the cooled liquid into a filter, you toss it a second and a third time through the filter until it turns out clear. After having covered it, store it away.

  Physicians saw in garum all of the health benefits of salt fish contained in a bottle. It was prescribed as a medicine or, more commonly, mixed with other ingredients to make a medicine, usually for digestive disorders, and for such problems as sores, for which salt has clear healing powers. But it was also prescribed for a range of other ailments, including sciatica, tuberculosis, and migraine headaches.

  The only other place in the ancient world to use garum was Asia. The sauce appears to be, as some historians believe of the domesticated pig, an idea that occurred independently to the East and the West. The Asian sauce is thought to have originated in Vietnam, though the Vietnamese must have taken it in ancient times from the Chinese soy sauce, in those early times when the Chinese fermented fish with the beans.

  In Vietnam salt is so appreciated that poor people sometimes make a meal of nothing mor
e than rice and a salt blend, either salt and chili powder or the more expensive salt with ground, grilled sesame seeds. Salt is also mixed with minced ginger root. But more popular than any of these, since ancient times, is mám a brine made from salting small fish. Unlike the Roman version, Asian garum has remained popular into modern times and is made virtually everywhere in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and the Philippines, where it is called bagoong. In Thailand, where it is called nam pla, it is produced by more than 200 factories. The Koreans, the Chinese, the Japanese, even the Indians have variations.

  In Vietnam, is served over fruits and vegetables with hot peppers and garlic for New Year. Tré is a boiled pig head cut in slices and seasoned with . has many variations: cáy uses crab; squid; tôm, shrimp.

  The French, when they first encountered this sauce, apparently forgetting their own Latin heritage, were horrified that the Vietnamese ate “rotten fish.” The Romans had encountered similar reactions. In the early twentieth century, the celebrated Institut Pasteur in Paris studied for sixteen years, from 1914 to 1930, to understand the fermentation process that Vietnamese peasants had been employing for centuries. The two necessary ingredients were fish and salt. The fish were usually small ones of the Clupeidae family, to which herrings and sardines belong. The fish sat in salt for three days, which produced a juice, some of which was reserved to ripen in the sun, while the remainder was pressed with the fish to produce a mush. The two were then mixed together and left for three months, sometimes much longer. Then the solid parts were strained out.