Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  The ninth-century Vikings also maintained a base along the Adour River on the northern border of Basque provinces. No records exist of the Vikings teaching shipbuilding to the Basques. But at the time the Vikings built better ships because their hulls were constructed with overlapping planks. And it is known that about that time, the Basques started building their hulls the same way and soon had a reputation as the best shipbuilders in Europe.

  With their sturdy, new, long-distance ships equipped with enormous storage holds, the Basques were no longer limited to the whale’s winter grounds in their native Bay of Biscay. They loaded their rowboats onto ships and traveled more than 1,000 miles. By 875, only one generation after the arrival of the Vikings in their land, the Basques made the 1,500-mile journey to the Viking’s Faroe Islands.

  In those cold, distant, northern waters, they discovered something more profitable than whaling: the Atlantic cod. This large bottom feeder preserves unusually well because its white flesh is almost entirely devoid of fat. Fat resists salt and slows the rate at which salt impregnates fish. This is why oily fish, after salting, must be pressed tightly in barrels to be preserved, whereas cod can be simply laid in salt. Also, fatty fish cannot be exposed to air in curing because the fat will become rancid. Cod, along with its relatives including haddock and whiting, can be air-dried before salting, which makes for a particularly effective cure that would be difficult with oily fish such as anchovy or herring.

  Had the Vikings told the Basques about cod or perhaps even sold them some? The Vikings knew the cod well from Scandinavian waters. Less than a century after arriving in the Adour, a band of Vikings settled Iceland and then moved on to Greenland and from there, by the year 1000, to Newfoundland. They caught cod as they went and dried it in the arctic air. Realizing that dried cod was a tradable commodity, they soon established drying stations in Iceland to produce the export.

  But the Basques had spent centuries surrounded by the Roman Empire, where salted fish was a common food, which is probably why they thought of salt-curing whale meat. Now they started salting cod. The market was enormous. All of the formerly Roman world ate salt fish, and the Basques had a salt fish to sell that, after a day or more of soaking in fresh water, was whiter, leaner, and better, according to many, than the dark, oily, Mediterranean species that had been used before. Being a fatless fish, air-dried and salt-cured, salt cod, stiff as planks of wood, could be stacked on wagons and hauled over roads, even in warm Mediterranean climates. It was better than crapoix and equally affordable, and being a fish, was Church-approved for holy days. For those who desired a more extravagant cuisine, it only needed rich ingredients to dress it up.

  Guillaume Tirel, known as Taillevent, was the head chef for King Charles V of France, to whom he introduced cabbage. In the tradition of great French chefs, he worked his way up from a childhood in a royal kitchen in Normandy, assisting bellows tenders and spit turners rotating enormous roasts, and he hoisted and lowered the chains holding huge stockpots. Included in his menial jobs as a boy apprentice was desalinating salted meats, regarded as one of the basic skills of an accomplished cook. His nickname Taillevent meant “jib,” which is a small, fast, and versatile sail. Four different versions of his manuscript—scrolls of recipes titled Le viandier—have been found, all of uncertain dates, but since the working life of Taillevent was from 1330 to 1395, and these were the recipes he used, Le viandier is thought to predate Le mèsnagier de Paris, making it the oldest known French cookbook.

  In Le viandier, Taillevent wrote that “Salt cod is eaten with mustard sauce or with melted fresh butter over it.” Le mèsnagier de Paris borrowed the exact same prescription but added what even today is the best advice on preparing salt cod: “Salt cod that has been too little soaked is too salty; that which has soaked too long is not good. Because of this you must, as soon as you buy it, put it to the test of your teeth, and taste a little bit.”

  Robert May, a cook for the Royalists in turbulent seventeenth-century England, suggested salt cod be made into a pie.

  Being boiled, take it [the salt cod] from its skin and bones, and mince it with some pippins [apples], season it with nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, caraway-seed, currans, minced raisons, rose-water, minced lemon peel, sugar, slic’t [sliced] dates, white wine, verjuice [sour fruit juice, in this case probably from apples], and butter, fill your pyes, bake them, and ice them.

  —Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, 1685

  Though cod is found only in northern waters, salt cod entered the repertoire of most European cuisine, especially in southern Europe where fresh cod was not available. The Catalans became great salt cod enthusiasts and brought it to southern Italy when they took control of Naples in 1443. The following recipe comes from the earliest known cookbook written in Neapolitan dialect.

  BACCALÀ AL TEGAME

  [PAN-COOKED SALT COD]

  Always select the largest cod and the one with black skin, because it is the most salted. Soak it well. Then take a pan, add delicate oil and minced onion, which you will sauté. When it turns dark, add a bit of water, raisins, pine nuts, and minced parsley. Combine all these ingredients and just as they begin to boil, add the cod.

  When tomatoes are in season, you can include them in the sauce described above, making sure that you have heated it thoroughly.—Ippolito Cavalcanti (1787–1860), Cucina casereccia in dialetto Napoletano, Home cooking in Neapolitan dialect

  ALL OF THE fishing nations of northern Europe wanted to participate in the new, rapidly growing, extremely profitable salt cod market. They had the cod but they needed salt, and the Vikings may have been pivotal in solving this problem as well. One of the first Viking bases in the Loire was the island of Noirmoutier. One third of this long thin island, barely detached from the mainland of France at the estuary of the Loire, is a natural tidal swamp, which strong tides periodically flood with a fresh supply of seawater. The Vikings had long been interested in the use of solar evaporation in making sea salt. Traces of such Viking operations in the seventh century have been found in Normandy. But the northern climate would have made these saltworks unproductive. The climate has too much rainfall and not enough sunlight. It is not known exactly when Noirmoutier, the nearby mainland marshes of Bourgneuf and Guérande, and Ile de Ré, an island about sixty miles to the south, started building systems of artificial ponds, instead of relying on single pond evaporation. As with sharing their shipbuilding skills with the Basques, no record exists of the Vikings teaching artificial pond techniques, but it is known that at the time of their arrival, production greatly increased, that the ponds were built sometime in the ninth or tenth century, and that the Vikings had seen successive artificial pond systems in southern Spain. Since Guérande is in Celtic Brittany, Breton historians with a nationalist streak reject the Viking theory, preferring to believe that Celts originated the idea, which is also possible. It is more certain that the Vikings were the first to trade the salt of this area to the Baltic and other northern nations, establishing one of the most important salt routes of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

  As Europeans began to recognize that the natural solar evaporation of seawater was the most cost-effective way to produce salt, this area on the southern side of the Brittany peninsula, the Bay of Bourgneuf, became a leading salt center. This bay was the most northerly point in Europe with a climate suited to solar-evaporated sea salt. The bay also had the advantage of being located on the increasingly important Atlantic coast and was connected to a river that could carry the salt inland. Guérande on the north side of the mouth of the Loire River, Bourgneuf on the southern side and the island of Noirmoutier facing them, became major sea salt-producing areas.

  ONE GROUP OF Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second group remained in the Faroe Islands. The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. Soon th
e Vikings had vanished.

  Meanwhile, Basque ships sailed out with their enormous holds full of salt and returned with them stacked high with cod. They dominated the fast-growing salt cod market, just as they had the whale market, and they used their whale-hunting techniques as a model for cod fishing. They were efficient fishermen, loading huge ships with small rowboats and sailing long distances, launching the rowboats when they reached the cod grounds. This became the standard technique for Europeans to fish cod and was used until the 1950s, when the last few Breton and Portuguese fleets converted to engine power and dragging nets.

  Others besides the Basques caught cod in the Middle Ages—the fishermen of the British Isles, Scandinavia, Holland, Brittany, and the French Atlantic—but the Basques brought back huge quantities of salted cod. The Bretons began to suspect that the Basques had found some cod land across the sea. By the early fifteenth century, Icelanders saw Basque ships sailing west past their island.

  Did the Basques reach North America before John Cabot’s 1497 voyage and the age of exploration? During the fifteenth century, most Atlantic fishing communities believed that they had. But without physical proof, many historians are skeptical, just as they were for many years about the stories of Viking travels to North America. Then in 1961, the remains of eight Viking-built turf houses dating from A.D. 1000 were found in Newfoundland in a place called L’Anse aux Meadows. In 1976, the ruins of a Basque whaling station were discovered on the coast of Labrador. But they dated back only to 1530. Like Marco Polo’s journey to China, a pre-Columbian Basque presence in North America seems likely, but it has never been proved.

  FISHERMEN ARE SECRETIVE about good fishing grounds. The Basques kept their secret, and others may have also. Some evidence suggests that a British cod fishing expedition had gone to North America more than fifteen years before Cabot. The Portuguese believe their fishermen also reached North America before Cabot.

  Explorers, on the other hand, were in the business of announcing their discoveries. And they said the cod fishing in the New World was beyond anything Europeans had ever seen. Raimondo di Soncino, the duke of Milan’s envoy to London, sent the duke a letter saying that one of Cabot’s crew had talked of lowering baskets over the side and scooping up codfish.

  After Cabot’s voyage, large-scale fishing expeditions to North America were launched from Bristol, St.-Malo on the Brittany peninsula, La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast, the Spanish port of La Coruña in Celtic Galicia, and the Portuguese fishing ports. Added to this were the many Basque towns that had long been whale and cod ports, including Bayonne, Biarritz, Guéthary, St.-Jean-de-Luz, and Hendaye on the French side, Fuenterrabía, Zarautz, Guetaria, Motrico, Ondarroa, and Bermeo on the Spanish side. On board each of these hundreds of vessels, ranked as a senior officer, was a “master salter” who made difficult decisions about the right amount of salting and drying and how this was done. Both under- and oversalting could ruin a catch.

  In the Middle Ages, salt already had a wide variety of industrial applications besides preserving food. It was used to cure leather, to clean chimneys, for soldering pipes, to glaze pottery, and as a medicine for a wide variety of complaints from toothaches, to upset stomachs, to “heaviness of mind.” But the explosion in the salt cod industry after Cabot’s voyage enormously increased the need for sea salt, which was believed to be the only salt suitable for curing fish.

  For the Portuguese, the salt cod trade meant growth years for fishing and salt making. Lisbon was built on a large inlet with a small opening. Aviero, farther up on the marshy shores of the inlet, was an ideal salt-making location. It had been the leading source of Portuguese salt since the tenth century. But with the growing demand, the saltworks at Setúbal, built in a similar inlet just south of the capital, became Portugal’s leading supplier. Setúbal’s salt earned a reputation throughout Europe for the dryness and whiteness of its large crystals. It was said to be the perfect salt for curing fish or cheese.

  Until the sixteenth-century cod boom, La Rochelle had been a minor port because it was not on a river. But suddenly, riverless La Rochelle, because it was an Atlantic port near the Ile de Ré salt-works, became the leading Newfoundland fishing port of Europe. Between Cabot’s 1497 voyage and 1550, records show that of 128 fishing expeditions from Europe to Newfoundland, more than half left from La Rochelle, with holds full of salt from Ile de Ré.

  The Breton fishing ports also had a salt advantage. Salt was heavily taxed in France, but in order to bring the Celtic duchy of Brittany into the French kingdom, France had offered the peninsula an exemption from the hated gabelle, the French salt tax. Though the Breton ports were on the north coast of Brittany, it was only a short distance to the saltworks of Guérande, Noirmoutier, and Bourgneuf.

  While northerners had the fish but could not make the salt and southerners had salt but not the cod, the Basques had neither. And yet they managed to get both. By the thirteenth century, they had parleyed their shipbuilding skills into a dependable sea salt supply. They provided the Genoese with their large, well-built ships, and Genoa, in return, gave them access to the salt-works on the island of Ibiza.

  England, with its skilled and ambitious fishing fleet and its powerful navy, lacked sea salt. On the Channel coast, sea salt was produced by washing salty sand and evaporating the saltwater over a fire. This method was more costly and less productive than that utilizing the natural solar evaporation of seawater. “For certain uses such as curing fish English white salt and rock salt are not as good as Bay salt which is imported from France,” wrote William Brownrigg, a London physician, in his 1748 book, The Art of Making Common Salt.

  By “Bay salt,” he meant solar-evaporated sea salt. The Germans called it Baysalz. The reference is to the Bay of Bourgneuf. The coast from Guérande to Il de Ré had become so dominant in salt making that it was synonymous with solar-evaporated sea salt. There were better salts. Northern salts made from boiling peat and southern salts such as that of Setúbal were far whiter, which meant purer. French bay salt was intermittently described as gray, even black or sometimes green. But to northern Europe, it was large-grained, inexpensive, and nearby. An affluent household used bay for curing but more costly white salt for the table. Middle-class homes bought inexpensive bay salt, dissolved it back into brine, and boiled the brine over a fire until crystalized to make a finer salt for serving. Le mèsnagier de Paris offers such a recipe for “making white salt.”

  THE FEW CELTIC places that escaped Romanization are strikingly similar stretches of Atlantic coastline. The low country of southern Brittany with its mud flats in low tide and its marshes full of unexpected canals and ponds is reminiscent of South Wales. South Wales poet Dylan Thomas, describing his homeland—“ the water lidded land”—could also have been describing the area of Guérande in the center of a 100,000-acre inland sea with a small opening to the Atlantic. The tides were so powerful that one town, Escoublac, was completely washed to sea in the fourteenth century. After that the salt producers built a seventeen-mile wall separating the sea from the marshland. This wall, which prevents the flooding of 4,400 acres of salt ponds, is still maintained by the salt workers. Here, a salt worker is called a paludier, literally a swamp worker.

  The tidal area, called the traict, has two canals leading to smaller channels leading to an intricate system of large and small saltworks. The paludier let water into his ponds by a series of plugs in small wooden dams. The height of the unplugged holes determined the water level. The paludier held a wooden rake with a long pole and scraped up crystals, piling them on the earthen dikes at the edge of each pond. The piles were left to dry and then hauled away by wheelbarrow. It was a demanding craft because if the clay bottom was disturbed, the salt became black.

  In the evenings when a dry wind caused crystals to form on the surface of the water, the women would use long poles with a board on the end to skim the surface and bring in the fleur de sel. This was women’s work, because the fleur de sel salt was much lighter and beca
use it was believed the work required a woman’s delicate touch, though the dainty work included carrying on their heads baskets of the light salt weighing ninety pounds.

  The people of Brittany are Celts, speaking a language derived from the language of Vercingetorix. The paludiers spoke this language until the 1920s. The name Guérande comes from the Breton name Gwenn-Rann, meaning “white country.” Other village names include Poull Gwenn, meaning “white port,” and Bourc’h Baz, known in French as Le Bourg de Batz, which means “the place coming into view”—because it was on the other side of the salt marsh. Villages of curving streets, lined with one- and two-story stone houses with high-pitched roofs, grew up on the edges of the marsh.

  Salt makers carved ponds out of the grassy swamp, where leggy herons and startlingly white egrets waded. It would be easy to get lost in this marsh of tall amber grass with hidden black mud-bottomed waterways. But like mariners at sea, the paludiers could get a bearing from the distant black stone church steeples, especially the Moorish tip of Saint-Guénolé in Le Bourg de Batz, the church named after the patron saint of paludiers. The 180-foot steeple was added to the fifteenth-century church in the 1600s to show navigators the entrance from the marsh to the Loire.

  In 1557, 1,200 salt ships from other European ports came to Le Croisic, the rugged port by the opening of the marshy inland sea. Often the number of ships in the harbor far outnumbered the whitewashed stone houses of Le Croisic’s few streets. While La Rochelle was becoming France’s leading cod port, Le Croisic, between the salt that went out and the goods brought in to trade for salt, became the second most important French Atlantic port after Bordeaux. The British, the Dutch, and the Danish all bought French bay salt. Even the Spanish came to buy bay salt for their fisheries in northern Iberia such as La Coruña.