Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Irish, starting in the Middle Ages, traded for salt at Le Croisic. They bought salt for herring, salmon, butter, leather curing, and especially beef and pork. The salt was usually shipped to Cork or Waterford. Their salted beef, the meticulously boned and salted forerunner of what today is known as Irish corned beef, was valued in Europe because it did not spoil. The French shipped it from Brest and other Breton ports to their new and fabulously profitable sugar colonies of the Caribbean—cheap, high-protein, durable slave food. This was later replaced with even cheaper New England salt cod. But the Irish corned beef still traveled far, in part because it was adopted by the British navy—competing with salt cod as a provision.

  Irish corned beef became a staple in Pacific islands visited by the British navy, where it is called keg. These islands, especially those of the Hawaiian chain, were well suited for salt making. Hawaiians traditionally made salt for home use by hollowing out a rock to a bowl-like shape and leaving sea water to evaporate in it. They quickly learned to dig evaporation ponds and developed a trade provisioning British, French, and later American ships with salted food such as corned beef, which then became part of their diet as well. Richard Henry Dana, the Harvard graduate who shipped out on the American merchant fleet in the 1830s, in his account of the experience, Two Years Before the Mast, which became famous for exposing the appalling conditions on board ship, wrote of the terrible salt beef sailors had to eat in the Pacific. They unkindly labeled it “salt junk.”

  It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name—corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals. But they did more harm to the name than the Pacific island trade, by canning it in South America. The Irish continued to make it well, and it has remained a festive dish there with cabbage for Christmas, Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day, the three leading holidays.

  This 1968 recipe by the “Woman Editor” of the Irish Times shows the care Irish take with corned beef, and avoids confusion with the lesser English version by calling it spiced beef, which may be closer to the original name.

  The following are the ingredients for spicing a six-pound joint:

  3 bay leaves

  1 teaspoon cloves

  6 blades mace

  1 level teaspoon peppercorns

  1 clove garlic

  1 teaspoon allspice

  2 heaped tablespoons brown sugar

  2 heaped teaspoons saltpeter

  1 pound coarse salt

  For cooking the meat you will need:

  one six-pound lean boned joint of beef

  three sliced carrots

  a half pint Guinness

  three medium sliced onions

  a bunch of mixed herbs

  one teaspoon each ground cloves and ground allspice

  Rub all the dry ingredients together, then pound in the bay leaves and garlic. Stand the meat in a large earthenware or glass dish and rub the spicing mixture thoroughly all over it. This should be done every day for a week, taking the spicing mixture from the bottom of the dish and turning the meat twice. Then wash the meat, and tie it into a convenient shape for cooking.

  Sprinkle over about one teaspoon each of mixed allspice and ground cloves, then put it into a large saucepan on a bed of the chopped vegetables. Barely cover with warm water, put the lid on and simmer gently for five hours. During the last hour add the Guinness.

  It could be eaten hot or cold, but at Christmas it is usually served cold, in slices. If wanted cold, the meat should be removed from the liquid and pressed between two dishes with a weight on top.—Theodora Fitsgibbon, A Taste of Ireland, 1968

  FOR THE BRITISH, salt was regarded as of strategic importance because salt cod and corned beef became the rations of the British navy. It was the same with the French. In fact, by the fourteenth century, for most of northern Europe the standard procedure to prepare for war was to obtain a large quantity of salt and start salting fish and meat. In 1345, the count of Holland prepared for his campaign against the Frisians by ordering the salting of 7,342 cod caught off the coast. Olaus Magnus, a Swedish bishop, in his 1555 A Description of the Northern Peoples, wrote that the provisions necessary to withstand a long siege were herring, eels, bream, and cod—all salted.

  The Guérande region specialized in salted fish, including hake, skate, mullet, and eel. In season, May and June, young undersized sardines, known for their delicate flavor, were eaten fresh. The rest of the year, larger sardines were layered in the local salt for twelve days, then washed in seawater and put in barrels. The barrels had holes on the bottom, and on the top was a heavy wooden beam hinged to the wall on one side and weighted with a boulder on the other. The juice was squeezed through the bottom, and every few days another layer of sardines was added until after two weeks the barrel could hold no more.

  Other fish were salted, especially during Lent, including mackerel, eel, and salmon. Here is a recipe for whiting—a smaller relative of cod—and one for eel.

  Let it die in the salt where you leave it whole for three days and three nights. Then blanch it in scalding water, cut it in slices, cook it in water with green onions. If you want to salt it overnight, clean and gut it. Then cut it in slices; salt by rubbing each slice well with coarse salt.—Le mèsnagier de Paris, 1393

  Take a salt eel and boil it tender, being flayed and trust round with scuers, boil it tender on a soft fire, then broil it brown, and serve it in a clean dish with two or three great onions boil’d whole and tender, and then broil’d brown; serve them on the eel with oyl and mustard in saucers.—Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, 1685

  The incentive of salt cod profits combined with improved artificial pond technology to greatly increase sea salt production, especially in France, but all along the Atlantic as well. And this increase in salt made more fish available. Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe. The salt intake of Europeans, much of it in the form of salted fish, rose from forty grams a day per person in the sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth century.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Nordic Dream

  IN SOME PARTS of Sweden it was “a dream porridge,” in others a pancake, that was made in silence and heavily salted. The custom was that the girl would eat this salty food and then go to sleep without drinking anything. As she slept, her future husband would come to her in a dream and give her water to quench her thirst.

  No data are available on the success rate of Swedish girls using this system to find a mate. But the Swedish dream of salt is well documented. The Swedes had a wealth of herring but nothing with which to salt it.

  One of the major commercial uses of salt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was to preserve herring, second only to salt cod, in the European lenten diet. Herring was such a dominant fish in the medieval market that in twelfth-century Paris saltwater fish dealers were called harengères, herring sellers.

  Herring is a Clupeidae, a member of the same family of small, forked-tailed oily fish with a single dorsal fin as sardines. Anchovies are of a different family but of the same Clupeiforme order as sardines and herring. Even in ancient times, Mediterraneans knew about herring, though they may not have known it as a fresh fish, since it is from northern seas. The Greeks called it alexium, from the word als or hals, as in Hallstatt, meaning “salt.” But the people of the Mediterranean world never embraced the salted herring the way they did the salted cod, probably because they had their own clupeiformes. The fact that herring became a hugely successful item of trade in the fourteenth century is directly related to the fact that Atlantic nations, herring producers, were gaining power and controlling markets and commerce in a way they never had before. Antwe
rp and Amsterdam became leading ports of Europe, far exceeding Genoa and Venice in importance. And just as salt cod became essential to the British and French navies, Dutch ships, both for war and commerce, were provisioned with salt-cured herring.

  Herring hide in ocean depths in winter, but in the spring until fall they rise and swim, sometimes thousands of miles, to their coastal spawning grounds. This phenomenon takes place from the Russian and Scandinavian Baltic, across the North Sea, as far south as northern France, and across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the Chesapeake Bay. Jules Michelet, the poetic nineteenth-century historian, wrote in La Mer, “A whole living world has just risen from the depths to the surface, following the call of warmth, desire, and the light.”

  It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root. A herring shoal consists of thousands of fish and, once located, provides an ample catch. But herring feed by gulping in seawater as they swim and filtering out minuscule zooplankton. They will search thousands of miles for these drifting beds of food, which means that a spot that had always been teeming with herring may suddenly one day be devoid of a single one, and they might not return to that spot for years. For the peoples of northern Europe who depended on herring, this could be a cataclysmic event, often blamed on the sins of the village folk. In the Middle Ages, adultery was thought to be a major cause of the herring leaving.

  Herring had been a leading source of food for Scandinavians and other populations on the Baltic and North Sea for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found herring bones among 5,000-year-old Danish remains. What really happened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was not so much new ways of salting nor new ways of fishing but an increased supply of salt. This was especially important for herring because the salt had to be readily available for the fishery. Unlike the fat-free cod, herring must be salted within twenty-four hours of being lifted from the sea. This was an almost universally agreed upon and inviolable law of herring curing. In 1424, the count of Holland threatened to prosecute any fishermen who cured a herring that had been out of the water for more than twenty-four hours.

  There was also an invention of sorts. The standard technique for preserving fish going back to Phoenician times was to gut it, dry it, and pack it in layers with salt. In 1350, Wilhelm Beuckelzon, a fisherman from Zeeland, the fishing center of south Holland—or in other accounts Wilhelm Beucks, a fish merchant in Flanders—started a practice of pickling herring in brine, fresh with no drying at all, and therefore the fish could be cured without the risk of its fat turning rancid from exposure to the air. For centuries, Europe’s powers, in their bids for control of the Lowlands, paid homage to Beuckelzon, the inventor of barreled herring. In 1506, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was raised in Flanders, visited Beuckelzon’s grave to honor his contribution to mankind. But in truth Beuckelzon’s invention ranks with Marco Polo’s discovery of pasta, or even Columbus’s discovery of America, as one of history’s more bogus tales.

  At the time of Beuckelzon’s invention, herring already had been barreled in brine by the Scandinavians, the French, the Flemish, and the English for centuries. Nevertheless, the myth, like many myths, lived on. In 1856, Czar Alexander II of Russia erected a monument to the memory of a fourteenth-century Flemish fisherman named Benkels, who, he said, invented barrel-packed herring and then moved to Finland, thus spreading the idea to Scandinavia. These tributes, even if factually dubious, do speak to the importance northern nations attached to barreled brine-salted herring.

  The booming medieval salt fish market was low end—lenten food for poor people. Upper-class people had their fish sped to them fresh, or if they lived too far from the water, had their royal fish ponds and holding tanks, or farmed fish such as carp. But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries an estimated 60 percent of all fish eaten by Europeans was cod, and a significant portion of the remaining 40 percent was herring.

  Cured herring had an even lower standing than salted cod, and it was hated by many poor people who had nothing else to eat for holy days. The French way of saying that breeding will tell is le caque sent toujours le hareng, the barrel always smells of herring. In Brittany, a rock known to romantics as the Tomb of Almanzor, the legendary tomb of a lover who was drowned at sea, was laughingly known by Breton workers as tombeau du hareng saur, the tomb of the pickled herring, because it was where they ate their lunch.

  But despite its low standing, fortunes could be made on furnishing the poor with herring. The herring was plentiful. Access to salt was the only limitation.

  EVAPORATING SEAWATER OVER a fire was slow and costly, but northerners developed techniques to produce salt in gray, rainy climates. In northern Holland and southern Denmark, peat salt was made by burning peat that was impregnated with seawater. This ocean-soaked peat, known in Dutch as zelle, was dug from the tidal flats off the coast. The Dutch sometimes built temporary dikes to seal off an area while zelle was being harvested. It would be loaded on boats and carried to the mainland.

  In the Middle Ages, Zeeland, the ocean-pocked estuary of the Schelde River in southern Holland, was a center for peat salt. Porters would carry the sea-logged peat to huts, where it was dried and burned. All that would remain would be ashes and salt. Saltwater was added, and it would absorb the salt in a brine and leave behind the ashes. The brine was then evaporated. When badly made, this produced an impure product known as black salt. But it could also produce a very white, fine-grained salt if the peat was not mixed with soil and if an unscrupulous salt maker had not bulked up his crystals by deliberately adding white ashes. Good-quality peat salt from the Lowlands was highly valued for herring but was expensive and produced only in small quantities.

  By the mid–thirteenth century, good-quality zelle was becoming hard to find and very valuable, which made peat salt even more expensive. The greedy would pilfer dikes, the earthworks that kept out the sea, for peat. The one sacrosanct law of Dutch society, a nation living at sea level and below, is to preserve the dikes. Salt makers began to be seen as a threat to this critical first line of national defense, and laws were passed heavily taxing zelle, then fining anyone who dug peat within the Zeeland dikes, and, in time, repressing the salt industry.

  Salt making from Olaus Magnus’s 1555 A Description of the Northern Peoples. Kungliga Biblioteket

  Some sea salt was produced on the southern shore of England, but only in unusually dry, sunny summers. On the Danish island of Laesø, in the body of water known as the Kattegat, which lies between Denmark and Sweden, sea salt was produced by evaporating ocean water to a denser brine and then boiling it. The Finnish, too, made salt by this process, boiling down arctic seawater near the current Russian town of Murmansk. The salt was mostly used for the productive salmon fishery of the area, but some of it was shipped by cart to Finland and Russia. The Norwegians used a similar process. Though this salt was expensive, the demand made it economically feasible. Oslo was actually a salt trading center.

  Olaus Magnus described how Norwegians improved upon this arduous sea salt process by pumping saltier water from sea depths by means of piping made from hollowed tree trunks. The same practice was carried out in Sweden until the eighteenth century. The process destroyed a great deal of forest, the source of fuel and piping, to produce only a small amount of salt.

  Sweden hoped to acquire an island in the Caribbean from which to produce salt, but when it finally got one, St.-Barthélemy, the amount of salt produced and shipped back to Sweden was barely enough to cure the quantity of herring destined for the island as slave food.

  The shortage of salt in the North was frustrating because of all the world’s oceans, the cold subarctic seas have the densest schools and the greatest variety of species. Magnus wrote:

  Herring can be purchased very cheaply for the supply is copious. They present themselves in such large numbers off shore that they not only burst the fishermen’s nets
, but, when they arrive in their shoals, an axe or halberd thrust into their midst sticks firmly upright.—Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples, 1555

  Landing herring from Olaus Magnus’s 1555 A Description of the Northern Peoples. Kungliga Biblioteket

  The abundance of herring, combined with their method of extracting food from swallowing seawater and the fact that they appeared to die instantly when taken from the water, led some medieval observers of natural phenomena to conclude that herring was a unique species of fish whose only nourishment was the seawater itself. Adding to their mystique, herring seem to let out a cry when they die, a high-pitched hiss, which is probably air escaping the swimming bladder.

  The small fish were also noted by maritime people for a phenomenon known as herring lightning, which occurred because the shoals were so dense that they reflected light.

  In the sea at night its eyes shine like lamps, and, what is more, when these fish are moving rapidly and the huge shoal turns back on itself, they resemble flashes of lightning in the churning water.—Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples, 1555

  A NUMBER OF ways were found to preserve herring with small quantities of salt. The Dutch had their groene haringen, green herring, sometimes called new herring, which was gutted on board ship in early spring or late fall—before or after spawning. The herring were deboned, but the gall bladder had to be left in the fish because it contains enzymes that cure it. Then the fish were dunked in a mild brine. They had to be eaten soon, ideally within twenty-four hours, so while green herring required less salt, they had limited trading value.