Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  THE ROMANS USED garum in much the same way that the Chinese used soy sauce. Rather than sprinkling salt on a dish, a few drops of garum would be added to meat, fish, vegetables, or even fruit. The oldest cookbook still in existence, De re coquinaria—which is credited to Apicius, though it appears to be a compilation of a number of Roman cooks from the first century A.D.—gives far more recipes with garum than with salt. Garum was much more expensive than salt, but Apicius was clearly writing for the upper classes. According to Seneca, Apicius committed suicide because, having spent one tenth of a considerable fortune on his kitchen, he realized that he could not long continue in the style he had chosen.

  The following recipe from Apicius is an example of the kind of elaborate molded dish that the Romans loved. It is seasoned with garum, and there is no other mention of salt in the dish.

  [Place cooked] mallows, leeks, beets, or cooked cabbage sprouts, roasted thrushes and quenelles of chicken, tidbits of pork or squab, chicken, and other similar shreds of fine meats that may be available. Arrange everything in alternating layers [in a mold].

  Crush pepper and lovage [a bitter herb, common as parsley in ancient Rome] with two parts old wine, one part broth [garum], one part honey and a little oil. Taste it; and when well-mixed and in due proportions put in a sauce pan and allow to heat moderately; when boiling add a pint milk in which [about eight] eggs have been dissolved; pour over [the mold and heat slowly but do not allow to boil] and when thickened serve. [The dish would usually be unmolded before serving.]

  A simpler recipe using garum instead of salt is that for braised cutlets:

  Place the meat in a stew pan, add one pound of broth [garum], a like quantity of oil, a trifle of honey, and thus braise.

  And here is one for a fish sauce:

  Sauce for roasted red mullet: pepper, lovage, rue [an aromatic evergreen], honey, pine nuts, vinegar, wine, garum, and a bit of oil. Heat and pour over the fish.

  Although this style of cooking was a kind of haute cuisine for the elite, costly garum was frequently described as “putrid,” which is to say rotten. “That liquid of putrefying matter,” said Pliny. Seneca, the outspoken first-century philosopher, called it “expensive liquid of bad fish.” But his protégé, the poet Martial, apparently did not agree since he once sent garum with the note “accept this exquisite garum, a precious gift made with the first blood spilled from a living mackerel.”

  But Martial was probably writing about garum sociorum, which means “garum among friends,” the most expensive garum, made exclusively from mackerel in Spain. Garum factories of varying standards were built on the coast not only in Roman ports such as Pompeii, but in southern Spain, the Libyan port of Leptis Magna, and in Clazomenae in Asia Minor. Since the Britons both made salt and exported fish, it is likely that England too was involved in the Roman salt fish and garum trade.

  Many types of garum were made—even a kosher garum, garum castimoniale, for the sizable Jewish market in Roman-occupied Israel. Castimoniale, in accordance with Jewish dietary law, was guaranteed to have been made only from fish with scales. The usual fish for garum—tuna, sardines, anchovies, or mackerel—all have scales and are kosher. But it seems even in the first century, a rabbinical certification brought a better price.

  As the market for garum grew, low-priced brands began to appear on the market. Slaves even made garum from household fish scraps. There is often a thin line between pungent and rotten, and some of these sauces must have emitted sickening smells. Apicius offered a recipe for fixing garum that smelled bad.

  If garum has contracted a bad odor, place a vessel upside down and fumigate it with laurel and cypress and before ventilating it, pour the garum in the vessel. If this does not help matters, and if the taste is too pronounced, add honey and fresh spikenard [new shoots—novem spicum] to it; that will improve it. Also new must should be likewise effective.

  WHEN THE ROMANS took over the Phoenician salt fish trade, they discovered how to make their purple dye. A logical byproduct of fish salting, the dye was produced by salting murex, a Mediterranean mollusk whose three-inch shell resembles a dainty whelk.

  According to legend, the presence of this dye was discovered when Hercules took his sheepdog for a walk along the beach in Tyre. When the inquisitive dog bit into a shellfish, his mouth turned a strange dark color. From at least as early as 1500 B.C., this dye brought wealth to merchants in Tyre.

  The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power. Julius Caesar decreed that only he and his household could wear purple-trimmed togas. The high priests of Judaism, the Cohanim, dyed the fringes of their prayer shawls purple. Cleopatra dyed the sails of her warship purple. Virgil, the first-century-B.C. poet, wrote, “And let him drink from a jeweled cup and sleep on Sarran purple,” Sarran meaning “from Tyre.”

  murex

  Pliny wrote that men were slaves to “luxury, which is a very great and influential power inasmuch as men scour forests for ivory and citrus-wood and all the rocks of Gaetulia (North Africa) for the murex and for purple.”

  Romans who could afford it also ate murex, the ultimate luxury food, which they called “purple fish.” One recipe called for it to be served surrounded by the tiny birds known as figpeckers. It is still eaten, steamed and twisted out of the shell with a pin, by the French, who call it rocher, the Spanish, who call it cañadilla, and the Portuguese, who call it búzio.

  Pliny described the arduous process to obtain the dye:

  There is a white vein with a very small amount of liquid in it: . . . Men try to catch the murex alive because it discharges its juice when it dies. They obtain the juice from the larger purple-fish by removing the shell: they crush the smaller ones together with their shell, which is the only way to make them yield their juice. . . .

  The vein already mentioned is removed, and to this, salt has to be added in the proportion of about one pint for every 100 pounds. It should be left to dissolve for three days, since, the fresher the salt, the stronger it is. The mixture is then heated in a lead pot with about seven gallons of water to every fifty pounds and kept at a moderate temperature by a pipe connected to a furnace some distance away. This skims off the flesh which will have adhered to the veins, and after about nine days the cauldron is filtered and a washed fleece is dipped by way of a trial. Then the dyers heat the liquid until they feel confident of the result.—Gaius Plinius Secundus, Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, first century A.D.

  The nature of the precious liquid from which purple came would not be entirely understood for another two millennia. In 1826, a twenty-three-year-old student at the Ecole de Pharmacie, Antoine Jérôme Balard, after studying the composition of salt marshes, concluded that the blackish-purplish, foul-smelling liquid present in marsh water, the residue water from which salt crystals had formed, was a previously unidentified chemical element. Because the liquid was identical to the purple secretion of the murex, he named the new element muride. The Académie Française, wary of having major discoveries come from students, thought at the least it should not let him give the name. So they changed muride to bromine, a word meaning “stench.”

  Murex was made in much of the Roman Mediterranean, in North Africa, on the Mediterranean coast of Gaul. Mountains of ancient murex shells from Roman times have been found in the Israeli port of Accra. Between this stinking bromine solution from the dyeworks and the smell of fish being cured, the Roman Empire must have had a redolent coast.

  AFTER THE FALL of Rome in the fifth century, garum was often thought of as just one of the unpleasant hedonistic excesses for which Rome was remembered. Leaving fish organs in the sun to rot was not an idea that endured in less extravagant cultures. Of course when garum was made properly, the salt prevented rotting until the fermentation took hold. But it became increasingly difficult to convince people of this. Anthimus, living in sixth-century Gaul, in a culture that was leaving Rome behind, rejected garum for salt
or even brine:

  Loin of pork is best eaten roasted, because it is a good food and well digested, provided that, while it is roasting, it is spread with feathers dipped in brine. If the loin of pork is rather tough when eaten, it is better to dip in pure salt. We ban the use of fish sauce from every culinary role.—Anthimis, De obseruatione ciborum (On the Observance of Foods), circa A.D. 500

  Anthimus’s pronouncement on garum has echoed through Western cooking: “Nam liquamen ex omni parte prohibemus,” We ban the use of garum from every culinary role.

  Sardines, which got their name from being a highly praised salt fish cured in Sardinia, were favored for garum. Gargilius Martialis, writing in the third century A.D., specified sardines for making garum. Modern divers examining a shipwreck off of southeastern Sicily found fifty Roman amphorae containing salted sardines. But in later centuries, sardines became better appreciated fresh with a sprinkling of salt.

  Sardines: In their natural state they should be fried; when done, garnish them with orange juice and a little of the frying oil and salt; they are eaten hot.—Cuoco Napoletano, anonymous, Naples, late 1400s

  After the fall of Rome, garum vanished from the Mediterranean, the region lost its importance as a salt fish producer, and the purple dye industry faded. But the Roman idea that building saltworks was part of building empires endured.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Salting It Away in the Adriatic

  THE FALL OF the Roman Empire left the Mediterranean, the most economically important region of the Western world, without a clear leader but with many aspirants. The region was the most competitive it had been since the rise of the Phoenicians.

  The entire coast of the Mediterranean was studded with saltworks, some small local operations, others big commercial enterprises such as the ones in Constantinople and the Crimea. The ancient Mediterranean saltworks that had been started by the Phoenicians, like power itself, passed from Romans to Byzantines to Muslims.

  The saltworks that the Romans had praised remained the most valued. Egyptian salt from Alexandria was highly appreciated, especially their fleur de sel, the light crystals skimmed off the surface of the water. Salt from Egypt, Trapani, Cyprus, and Crete all had great standing because they had been mentioned by Pliny in Roman times.

  VENICE, THE ONE Italian city that was not part of Roman history, was settled on islands in the lagoons in the Adriatic. The coast of Venetia was substantially different than it is today. A series of sandbars, called lidi, sheltered lagoons from the storms of the Adriatic. These lagoons stretched from Ravenna, the commercial and political center of the Venetian coast, up the estuary of the Po River to Aquileia, on the opposite side of the Adriatic next to Trieste. Lido has become the name of a sandbar in Venice, particularly popular with the hordes of tourists who now wander the streets and canals of that city. But even in Roman times, the lidi were for tourists, summer resorts for affluent Romans.

  In the sixth century, the mainland, what had been the Roman province of Veneto, was invaded by Germanic tribes. To preserve their independence, small groups of people, like Bostonians fleeing to Martha’s Vineyard, moved to the islands protected by their summer vacation lidi.

  Cassiodorus, a sixth-century high Roman official turned monastic scholar, admired these settlements in the lagoons. He likened their houses, part on land and part on sea, to aquatic birds.

  Rich and poor live together in equality. The same food and similar houses are shared by all; wherefore they cannot envy each other’s hearths, and so they are free from the vices that rule the world. All your emulation centers on the saltworks; instead of ploughs and scythes, you work rollers [for salt production] whence comes all your gain. Upon your industry all other products depend for, although there may be someone who does not seek gold, there never yet lived the man who does not desire salt, which makes every food more savory.—Cassiodorus, A.D. 523.

  As with Rome, Venetian democracy was more of an ideal than a practice. But, though Cassiodorus may have been overly enthusiastic about Venetian egalitarianism, the importance that he attributed to salt in Venice was not exaggerated. Salt was the key to a policy that made Venice the dominant commercial force of southern Europe.

  The Italian mainland was originally much farther away from the islands that are now the city of Venice. The area between these islands and the peninsula of Comacchio was called the Seven Seas. “To sail the seven seas” meant simply sailing the Seven Seas—accomplishing the daunting task of navigating past the sandbars of those treacherous twenty-five miles.

  About A.D. 600, Venetians started using landfill to extend the mainland closer to the islands of modern-day Venice. The Seven Seas became a landmass with a port named Chioggia. Below it, in a now much-narrowed lagoon, was Comacchio, overlooking the delta of the Po. Ravenna, formerly a port, became an inland city, and nearby Cervia became its port.

  By the seventh century, with the Seven Seas gone, the Venetians built salt ponds along the newly formed land of Chioggia. Cassiodorus wrote that the Venetians were using “rollers,” but sometimes this is translated as “tubes” or “cylinders.” It is not clear if he was speaking of rollers to smooth down the floors of artificial evaporation ponds or cylindrical pottery to boil seawater into crystals. Both techniques had been common in Rome.

  Between the sixth and ninth centuries, the last great technical advance in salt manufacturing until the twentieth century was invented. Instead of trapping seawater in a single artificial pond, closing it off, and waiting for the sun to evaporate the water, the salt makers built a series of ponds. The first, a large open tank, had a system of pumps and sluices that moved the pond’s seawater to the next pond, after it reached a heightened salinity. There the water evaporated further, and a still denser brine was moved to the next pond. At the same time, fresh seawater was let into the first pond so that a fresh batch of brine was always beginning. When brine reaches a sufficient density, salt precipitates out—it crystalizes, and the crystals fall to the bottom of the pond, where they can be scooped out. In a pond with only solar heat, it may take a year or more for seawater to reach this density. But given sufficient sun and wind and a season dry enough not to have rainfall dilute the ponds, the only limit to production is the available area, the number of ponds that can operate simultaneously. It requires little equipment, a very small investment, and, except for the final scraping stage, the harvest, little manpower.

  Some Western historians believe that the Chinese may have been the first to develop this technique around A.D. 500. But Chinese historians, who are loath to pass up founder’s rights to any invention, lay no claim to this one. The Chinese were not pleased with the salt produced by this technique. Slow evaporation results in coarse salt, and the Chinese have always considered fine-grained salt to be of higher quality.

  The idea of successive evaporation ponds seems to have started in the Mediterranean, where coarse salt was valued for salting fish and curing hams. The North African Muslims operating in the early Middle Ages throughout the Mediterranean may have been the first to use such a system, introducing it to Ibiza in the ninth century.

  By the tenth century, multiple ponds were being used on the Dalmatian coast, across the Adriatic from Venice. In 965, ponds were built in Cervia, and by the eleventh century, the Venetians had built a pond system.

  Venice had intense competition on its little strip of the Adriatic. Close to Venice’s Chioggia was Comacchio, where Benedictine monks produced salt. In 932, the Venetians ended that competition by destroying the saltworks at Comacchio. But this served to strengthen the position of the third important saltworks in the area, Cervia, controlled by the archbishop of the nearby no-longer-coastal city of Ravenna.

  For a time the two principal salt competitors in the region were the commune of Venice and the archbishop of Ravenna—Chioggia and Cervia. Venice had the advantage because Chioggia was more productive than Cervia. But Chioggia produced sali minutti, a fine-grained salt. When Venetians wanted coarser salt, they had to
import it. Then, in the thirteenth century, after a series of floods and storms destroyed about a third of the ponds in Chioggia, the Venetians were forced to import even more salt.

  That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer.

  This meant that the Venetian public was paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade. When grain harvests failed in Italy, the Venetian government would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.

  Unlike the Chinese salt monopoly, the Venetian government never owned salt but simply took a profit from regulating its trade. Enriched by its share of sales on high-priced salt, the salt administration could offer loans to finance other trade. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period when Venice was a leading port for grain and spices, between 30 and 50 percent of the tonnage of imports to Venice was in salt. All salt had to go through government agencies. The Camera Salis issued licenses that told merchants not only how much salt they could export but to where and at what price.

  The salt administration also maintained Venice’s palatial public buildings and the complex hydraulic system that prevented the metropolis from washing away. The grand and cherished look of Venice, many of its statues and ornaments, were financed by the salt administration.