Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  Since the time of ancient Greece, anchovies have been the most praised salted fish in the Mediterranean, and since the Middle Ages those of Collioure have been regarded as the best salted anchovies in the world. They are smaller, leaner, more flavorful than their Atlantic cousins. In the Middle Ages, Collioure was also famous for its salted tuna and sardines. The salters were men because their strength was needed to heft the salt. Anchovy filleting was done by women because it required small fingers to rip the tiny fillets off the bones. Freshly caught anchovies were mixed in sea salt and kept for a month. Then the heads were removed and the fish cleaned with no tool other than the swift nimble fingers of the women, who then carefully arranged the fish in barrels with alternating layers of fish and salt. There they remained with a heavy weight on top for about three months. The length of time depended on the size of the fish and the weather, especially the temperature. When the anchovies were ripe, the color of the meat around the bones was a deep pink, almost wine colored, and the brine, produced by the salt melting in the juice it extracted from the fish, turned pink. Unscrupulous anchovy makers dyed their brine pink.

  ANCHOVIES: These delicate fish are preserved in barrels with bay salt, and no other of the finny tribe has so fine a flavor. Choose those which look red and mellow, and the bones must be oily. They should be high flavored, and have a fine smell; but beware of their being mixed with red paint to improve their color and appearance.—Mary Eaton, The Cook and Housekeepers Complete and Universal Dictionary, Bungay, England, 1822

  The French Crown attached such importance to the commercial potential of Collioure salted fish that the town was exempted from any salt tax. This greatly aided the local anchovy business, but it was the sort of arbitrary exception that was to make the French salt tax a political disaster.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Hapsburg Pickle

  IN GERMANY, THE Romans had found a land of ancient salt mines. Tacitus wrote in the first century A.D. that the Germanic tribes believed the gods listened more attentively to prayers if they were uttered in a salt mine. But many of those mines had been destroyed or closed down in the warfare that followed the disintegration of Rome. As in France, the medieval Church reopened them. Monasteries were often located on the sites of ancient mines so that the salt could provide revenue.

  Under the direction of the Church, salt mining boomed in the Middle Ages in the Alpine area from Bavaria into Austria. In Bavaria, Berchtesgaden and adjacent Reichenhall; across the Austrian border, Hallein, Hallstatt, Ischl, and Aussee were all mining the same underground bed of salt. The Austrian part became known as the Salzkammergut, the salt mother lode, a region of salt mines below green, pine-covered mountains and deep blue lakes. In the winter, the steep pine forests were completely white with snow, but underground the temperature in the mines remained moderate.

  Underground springs provided brine that could be boiled into salt crystals. Plentiful forests offered cheap energy. Reichenhall, which was still in operation in Roman times, was destroyed in the fifth century either by Attila the Hun or possibly by the local supporters of Odoacer, Rome’s final conqueror, the Germanic-Italian who in 476 officially ended the Western Roman Empire. A century later, according to some accounts, the saltworks was reconstructed. According to others, it was rebuilt 300 years later by the archbishop of Salzburg.

  Next to Reichenhall was a mountain of salt. On the Bavarian side was Berchtesgaden, and across the border, on the opposite side of the same steep wooded mountain known as Dürnberg, was the ancient Celtic salt mining site of Hallein.

  A medieval conflict between the archbishops of Salzburg and the Bavarians over control of the salt mines continued for centuries because Dürnberg mountain contained a Salzburger mine entered on the Hallein side and a Bavarian mine entered from Berchtesgaden. Underground, the two mines were supposedly separated by less than a half mile, but the shafts from Hallein wandered under the border and so Salzburger miners theoretically took Bavarian salt.

  The first archbishop of Salzburg had resurrected the ancient Celtic mine in the late eighth century and with this salt revenue had built the city of Salzburg, which did not merge with Austria until 1816. Though Salzburg’s territory had gold, copper, and silver, it was salt for which Salzburg repeatedly fought. The wealth from salt gave Salzburg its independence.

  In the seventeenth century, an archbishop named Wolf Dietrich tried to dominate the salt market by dramatically lowering the selling price for salt from his mines, especially Dürnberg. For a time Dietrich made tremendous profits, some of which were used to build grand baroque buildings in Salzburg. Bavaria retaliated by banning trade with Salzburg, and this eventually led to a “salt war,” a conflict which Dietrich lost. This defeat was disastrous for Dürnberg and its village of Hallein because, for a time, they were excluded from much of the regional salt trade. It was even more disastrous for Archbishop Wolf Dietrich, who was removed from his Church post and, after five years in prison, died in 1617.

  The relationship between the two sides of Dürnberg mountain was not resolved until after Salzburg became a part of Austria, when, in 1829, a treaty between Bavaria and Austria allowed Austrians to mine salt up to one kilometer beyond their border. In exchange, 40 percent of mine workers had to be Bavarian, and Bavaria could fuel its pans with trees chopped on the Austrian side. Though fuel had been plentiful in the Middle Ages, after centuries of mining, procuring wood had become an important issue.

  IN 1268 AND possibly earlier, a new technique was used to mine rock salt. Instead of miners carrying chunks of rock out steep shafts in baskets slung on their backs, and then crushing the rock into salt, water was piped into a dug-out vein of rock salt. The water quickly became a dense brine, which was then piped out of the mountain to the village of Hallein, where it was boiled down into crystals over wood-burning fires.

  Eventually, the idea became a more sophisticated system known in the Salzkammergut as sinkwerken. A sinkwerk was an underground work area in which the surrounding salt and clay were mixed with water in large wooden tanks. The solution then moved down wooden pipes to iron boiling pans.

  Hallein is a village pressed between its two sources of wealth, the rough, rock-faceted Dürnberg Mountain and the Salzach River. The Salzach is a tributary of the Danube, and the brown Danube runs, with its tentacles of tributaries, from west of Bavaria through central Europe to the Black Sea. The salt could be boiled in cylindrical molds, much as it still is in Saharan Africa, and the cylinders could be loaded in barges that traveled the Salzach to Passau, where it entered the Danube, to be traded in Germany or central Europe.

  But much of Hallein’s salt was for local use, traveling by river only to Passau, where it was packed on wagons to be sold in the region. Transporting on land was expensive because tolls were established along the roadways for wagons carrying salt. The inevitable response was a network of paths over rugged mountain passes for smugglers carrying illegal salt, which they could sell for less because they paid no tolls.

  Diagram of sinkwerken in Dürnberg Mountain shown from the Bavarian side in Berchtesgaden. Deutsches Museum, Munich

  RIVERS WERE ESSENTIAL to central European saltworks. Halle in central Germany and Lüneburg in the north, with its famous founding ham, had the advantage of the Elbe with its mouth at the North Sea port of Hamburg. In the late fourteenth century, the Lüneburgers built a canal, the Steckenitz Canal, to connect their salt to the Elbe. They did this not to move salt to nearby Hamburg but to ship it to Lübeck, on a tributary to the Baltic, because Lübeck was the trading center of the Hanseatic League.

  In the Middle Ages, no German salt enjoyed as great an international reputation as that of Lüneburg, and the Hanseatics shipped it to the herring fisheries of southern Sweden, to Riga, to Danzig, and throughout the Baltic. At a time when the Hanseatic League was considered the guarantor of quality, Lüneburg salt was considered the Hanseatic salt. Lesser German saltworks would fraudulently mark their barrels with the word Lüneburg to obtain entry to
foreign markets.

  The salt in Lüneburg, Halle, and other German saltworks was made by drawing the brine in buckets and carrying it to boiling sheds, where it was dumped in a huge rectangular iron pan. The pan sat on a wood-burning furnace. Blood was added, which caused a scum to rise with boiling. The scum drew impurities and was skimmed off with care. The salt maker needed to continually stir the liquid. Shortly before crystallization, beer was added to further draw impurities from the crystals, which were then placed to dry in conical baskets.

  With the pans in use twenty-four hours a day, except for a once-a-week cleaning, the entire operation required only three people: a master salter, an assistant, and a boy to stoke the furnace. This staff was often simply a man, his wife, and a son. It was easy for a family to go into the salt business. But in Lüneburg the business did not remain in the family because, one by one, Hanseatic merchants bought them out and gained control of a single large saltworks.

  THE SALZKAMMERGUT DEVELOPED its own salt-mining culture. Saint Barbara was its patron saint, and miners observed her day, December 4, by performing traditional dances in their own dress uniforms, which, by the nineteenth century, included a black wool jacket with brass buttons and epaulets and a black velvet hat with silk buttons and a gold emblem of two crossed pickaxes.

  The Dürnberg mine has nineteen miles of tunneling. The main tunnel was built in 1450, but the current timber shoring is only 100 years old. The tunnels were built with seven-foot ceilings and wide enough for a man to walk through comfortably. But the pressure of the mountain’s weight slowly compresses them. It was in such compressed ancient shafts that medieval miners discovered the remains of their Celtic predecessors. Today, one of the 400-year-old tunnels is only about eighteen inches wide in parts. Another seventeenth-century tunnel is about three feet wide.

  The tunnels, shored up with timber, have walls of dark rock with white streaks of salt crystals. In some spots the rock is spotted with fossils of shellfish and other marine life. Miners would ride on steep, smooth wooden slides, which propelled them at considerable speed down to tunnels sometimes as far as 100 feet lower. Some of the slides are more than 350 feet long. A cable on the right side provided a brake for the practiced gloved hands of the miners.

  Engraving of miners descending a shaft in the Dürnberg salt mine on a slide. The rope on their right is used as a brake. Salinen Austria, Dürnberg

  Dürnberg has been hosting visitors since at least the end of the seventeenth century, when tours were a special treat for elite guests of the archbishop of Salzburg. 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. The mine also has about twenty-five underground lakes for boat rides.

  MUCH OF THE salt of central Europe eventually came under the control of the Hapsburgs. From their beginnings in tenth-century Alsace, and as their rule spread across central Europe, the Hapsburg family controlled salt mines. In 1273, a Hapsburg became Rudolf I, king of Germany, who enlarged his holdings by conquering Bohemia. The Hapsburgs gained control of the Danube, Silesia, Hungary, and the southern region of Poland known as Galicia. For a time they even had Spain and all its New World possessions as well as the Netherlands, Naples, Sardinia, Sicily, and Venice.

  The Hapsburgs established a salt monopoly, controlling production, transport, and wholesale trade. Bohemia, one of the wealthier regions of Europe, was saltless, an eager market for other Hapsburg holdings in what is today Germany, Austria, and southern Poland.

  Hungary was another salt-poor region that came under Hapsburg rule. In sixteenth-century Hungary, with an economy based on the export of food, there were only four important food imports: spices, wine, herring, and salt. Much of the export of food depended on the import of salt. Pig fat was a staple for both eating and preserving other food. From the seventeenth century on, fat was included in wages. A high-fat diet was considered a sign of wealth, and city people luxuriated in more fat than peasants. An 1884 study showed that rural Hungarians ate an average per capita of forty pounds of cured—salted or smoked—fat, whereas city dwellers consumed an average per person of fifty-six pounds of fat. This does not include the significant amount of rendered animal fat that was eaten like butter, not to mention butter itself.

  Cooking with melted fat rather than preserved pieces was an eighteenth-century innovation—a refinement for the upper classes. The traditional fat was made by opening a freshly slaughtered pig and removing whole the thick outer layer of fat. This was then preserved in dry salt, after which it was smoked, except in the Great Plain, the flat grain-growing region east of the Danube, where it was air-dried. Peasants made thick soups that began by melting down pieces of this salted fat, which produced an oil for frying the rest of the soup’s ingredients, and cracklings which were sprinkled on top.

  SOUTHERN POLAND WAS the site of ancient springs where as early as 3500 B.C., brine was gathered and boiled in clay pots. But gradually these springs dried up. In 1247, miners began digging in the earth to get at the rock salt that had hardened at the sources of the brine. In 1278, the Polish Crown took possession of the mine but leased its operation to a succession of entrepreneurs, which included Poles, both Jewish and Christian, French, Germans, and Italians. They made payments to the controlling monarch and offered salt at discount rates to aristocracy.

  At first, salt miners, often prisoners of war, were worked to death in slave conditions. Not until the fourteenth century, when free men began working the mines, did it become less than a death sentence. In the sixteenth century, the mines went deeper, and huge pulley systems powered by teams of eight horses hoisted the salt to the surface. Horses that were brought in to work the mines spent their entire lives below ground.

  There are mountains in which the salt goes down very deep, particularly at Wieliczka and Bochnia. Here on the fifth of January, 1528, I climbed down fifty ladders in order to see for myself and there in the depths observed workers, naked because of the heat, using iron tools to dig out a most valuable hoard of salt from these inexhaustible mines, as if it had been gold and silver.—Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples, 1555

  The Polish Crown earned one-third of its annual revenues from the salt of these two mines near Cracow, Wieliczka and Bochnia.

  In 1689, the mines began offering miners daily Catholic services at their underground place-of-work. The miners of Wieliczka began carving religious figures out of rock salt. Three hundred feet below the surface, miners carved a chapel out of rock salt with statues and bas-relief scenes along the floor, walls, and ceiling. They even fashioned elaborate chandeliers from salt crystals.

  Increasingly, the mine had visitors. In the early seventeenth century, as in Dürnberg, the Crown began to bring special guests, mostly royalty. They came to dance in ballrooms, dine in carved dining rooms, be rowed in underwater lagoons. In 1830, the Wieliczka Salt Mine Band, which still performs, was started because of the quality of the acoustics in the mine.

  The Wieliczka mine and that of nearby Bochnia were near the Vistula, which flowed a few miles north to Cracow and then on to Warsaw and finally to the Baltic. Any salt with a water route to the Baltic had a huge market. But the Baltic port also meant that the coarse, dark gray rock salt of southern Poland had to compete with sea salt from France and Portugal. The Portuguese sold their Setúbal salt to the Hanseatics, who sold it in Holland and Denmark. By the sixteenth century, cheap, white Setúbal salt had also become popular in Poland and other Baltic countries. The Polish Crown responded by protecting its own salt with a ban on the import of all foreign sea salt.

  Entertaining visitors in the Grand Hall in the Wieliczka salt mine in 1867. The walls, ceiling, floor, chandeliers, and statues are all made from salt. Culver Pictures

  IN 1772, POLAND was partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia—vanished as a nation until after World War I. In acquiring the Galicia region, the Austrian Hapsburgs gained control of Wielicz
ka and Bochnia. The salt of these mines was sold not only in Poland but throughout the Hapsburg Empire and in Russia. The huge nation of Russia had a considerable demand for salt, especially to preserve meat and vegetables through a long and barren winter. Salting or corning beef in most societies was reserved for lesser cuts such as the brisket, which is the breast cut under the first five ribs, or the round, the toughest leg cut. But in Russia, beef was often frozen solid in the ground and sawed up with little regard for different cuts.

  Salt being transported by camel-drawn carts to the railroad at Lake Baskuntschak, in the southern Urals of Russia, circa 1929. Culver Pictures

  The following recipe comes from A Gift to Young Housewives, by Elena Molokhovets. Molokhovets and her book, which she continually revised between 1861 and 1917—poignant years wedged between the emancipation of the serfs and the Communist revolution—were well known in Russian households

  SOLONINA (SALTED BEEF)

  Use a towel to rub off any blood from freshly slaughtered beef. This must be done while the carcass is still warm because the blood very quickly spoils the meat. Remove the very large bones, weight the meat, and rub it all over with salt that has been dried in the oven and mixed with saltpeter and spices. Lay out the meat on a table to cool completely. Then pack into small barrels, placing the large pieces in the middle and small half-pound pieces around the edges so as not to leave any gaps. Press the meat lightly with a pounder. Sprinkle salt, saltpeter, bay leaves, rosemary, and allspice on the bottom of the barrel and over each layer of meat as the barrel is filled. When the barrel is full, cover it with a lid, seal with tar on all sides, and keep in a [warm] room for two to three days, every day turning the barrel over, first on one end then on the other. Transfer the barrel to the cold cellar, and then turn it over twice a week. After three weeks, store the barrel on ice.