Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Lezhi Fermented Product Corporation was a private factory that was nationalized after the 1949 Communist takeover, known here as “the liberation.” The state factory made an industrial soy sauce. But in 1999, in a fit of privatization, the state announced that it was no longer going to produce soy sauce in Lezhi. Since no one was interested in buying the company, its 100 workers were given severance pay and left jobless. Ten of them used their settlement money to buy the company. In order to get operating capital, they sold the large downtown plant and moved up a three-flight outdoor mud-and-stone stairway to a storage area on a hilltop at the edge of town.

  They no longer had the equipment or the capital to be an industry. So they decided they would have to make their soy sauce the way peasants used to make it. Xu Qidi, the general manager, said, “We had to start all over. This is the old way to do it.”

  Factories use the crushed refuse from soy oil production for making soy sauce, but the new Lezhi company uses fresh whole beans that are steamed until soft. The beans are then placed in a storage room on flat, round, straw trays that are about four feet in diameter. Yeast is then added. The trays are left on bamboo racks in the concrete storage room for three days, until mold forms on top.

  At this point, factories speed up the fermentation process by delaying the addition of salt and keeping the beans in heated bins. But in Lezhi the moldy beans are mixed with water and salt and stored in big, three-foot-deep crocks. The pots are left outdoors to ferment for six months to a year or longer, depending on weather conditions. When it rains, they are covered with coneshaped lids made of sewn palm fronds. Eventually, the paste looks like mud. Water is added, and the mush is slowly filtered through piping. Then it is sterilized by steaming.

  Some sauces are darker, some lighter, some thicker, some thinner. The best Lezhi sauce is not quite as thick as its number two product, but it is black, caramelly, and complex. Differences in sauces are determined by the length of fermentation and the amount of water added at the end.

  In Lezhi, soy sauce is still sold the old-fashioned way: Customers bring their own bottles, and the sauce is ladled out of crocks. But it is also marketed under the label Wo Bo, which is the name of a local bridge. A room in the dank little factory has a shiny new machine, the only shiny new thing in the plant. The handful of people that is the company, some in suit and tie, others in workers’ clothes, all entrepreneurs of the new China, look on with excitement as this machine seals soy sauce into plastic bags to be sold out of town.

  CHINA IS CHANGING quickly. The gray and red courtyard buildings of Beijing, some 500 years old, are being torn down at a pitiless rate. In the glare of neon lights that now explode in the sky every night on top of the capital’s new high-rise buildings, are Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s advertisements. Fried chicken has been easier to sell than hamburgers, because the Chinese have been eating fried chicken for centuries.

  Guo Zhenzhong, a sixty-three-year-old professor who lives in a small apartment stacked floor-to-ceiling with books in a ten-year-old apartment block that already looks eighty years old, does not fit perfectly into this new China. He dresses simply, studies his books, takes great pleasure in traveling to international academic conferences, and appears not to have heard the news that China has switched to a market economy. He cares little for the new consumerist China with its Western labels, both real and fraudulent. Like most Chinese, he still eats the old foods. He once went to a McDonald’s. What did he think of it?

  He shook his head disapprovingly and said, “No vegetables.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  More Salt than Fish

  THE IDEA THAT salt enhances the taste of sugar has not entirely vanished from the West. It is a guiding concept of the snack food industry. A clear example of this is honey-roasted peanuts, but in fact salt and sugar are ingredients in most industrial snack food.

  Before refrigeration, when butter was preserved with considerable quantities of salt, sugar was thought to counteract and even mask the saltiness.

  Since tasting is all that is needed to detect oversalting, some merchants try to mask this taste by adding a little sugar. So in tasting salted butter, if you detect a sweet or sugary taste, don’t buy it.—Francis Marre: Défendez votre estomac contre les fraudes alimentaires Protect your stomach against food fraud, Paris, 1911

  Curiously, the concept of sugar counteracting salt still flourishes in Sweden, a country which imports both its salt and its sugar, and perhaps for that reason gives them equal regard. The first record of sugar in Sweden is from 1324, when, for a funeral of the wealthiest man in the country, 1.5 kilo sugar, 1.5 kilo pepper, .5 kilo saffron—all exotic luxuries—were imported.

  According to Carl Jan Granqvist, a well-known Swedish restaurateur and food commentator, “Sugar brings out the saltiness of salt.” Cakes are made with salt. Breads are made with sugar. In September, when crayfish are in season in Sweden, they are served with salt, sugar, and dill. Sugar and salt is a leitmotif of Swedish cooking. There is even a Swedish word for it, socker-saltad, sugar salting, which is also the first ingredient listed on many labels.

  For newcomers to Scandinavia, one of the more infamous uses of sockersaltad is salt lakrits, salted licorice candy, which sometimes comes in the shape of herring, sometimes in laces, or in a gumdrop shape, called a salt bomber, with salt sprinkled on top. A salt lakrits–coated vanilla ice cream, sold on a stick, is a lakrits puck, though the manufacturer, GB Glace, said it was made with ammonium chloride, not sodium chloride, which does not seem at all reassuring. Swedes often mention salt lakrits as the one thing they miss when they go abroad. Other Scandinavians and the Dutch are afflicted with the same craving.

  Also high on the list of foods missed by Swedes abroad is kaviar, a name which purists would see as a travesty, since it contains no sturgeon eggs. Kaviar is salted cod roe mashed with potatoes and sold in a squeezable metal tube. The first ingredient listed on the tube is sockersaltad.

  The leading use of sockersaltad, and probably the one that has kept the taste in the northern palate, is for curing fish. On the west coast of Sweden, herring is ground with onions and made into fritters, which are served with a sweet currant sauce. One of the most celebrated expressions of this Swedish taste is gravlax, literally buried salmon. Originally, gravlax was salmon that was cured by being buried in the ground for days or months, an old Scandinavian technique used for preserving herring as well. The longer it is buried, the longer it will keep. But, paradoxically, the longer it has been buried, the more it resembles in smell and texture something rotten. Older Icelanders still horrify youth with smelly little chunks of hákarl, buried Greenland shark. Burying produces a very smelly fish rejected by most of the public. The Swedes have maintained the popularity of gravlax by replacing it with salmon cured with salt and sugar.

  HERRING STILL COMES and goes in the Baltic and the North Sea in ways no one can predict. The sea between Norway, Denmark, and Sweden is called the Skagerrak. Klädesholmen, a flat rocky island only yards off the Swedish coastline in the Skagerrak, has had only six good herring runs recorded in all of history. The first was in the sixteenth century. Then the herring went away and did not return until 1780. From 1780 to 1808, Klädesholmen was awash with herring. The villagers boiled herring in water, and the oil that rose to the surface lit the street-lamps of Paris and London.

  In those years, while herring seemed to be vanishing from the Norwegian coastline, the large population on the tiny island of Klädesholmen were fishing and processing herring, as well as cod and ling. The two boiling plants, owned by wealthy Göteborg and Stockholm merchants, made oil twenty-four hours a day. Then, in the early nineteenth century, fewer herring showed up each September. Some blamed this on the foul smell of the island with its herring oil plants dumping stinking waste back into the sea. Klädesholmen smelled so bad, it was said, that even the herring couldn’t stand it. There was not another good run until 1880 to 1900, and there were none in the twentieth century.
<
br />   More than 1,000 people lived on the island in the eighteenth century. By the twenty-first century, the island had only 470 inhabitants. In the early twentieth century, hundreds of women had been employed cutting up herring for canning, wearing aprons made from Cuban sugar sacks waterproofed with linseed oil. Men mixed salt for the herring with Cuban sugar, then added sandalwood, ginger, cloves, mace, coriander, cinnamon, allspice, oregano, dill, and bay leaf.

  In the 1980s, there were 200 herring workers. Today, more herring is produced with fewer than 100 people working for eight herring canneries, all of them family-owned businesses. For the small companies on Klädesholmen, it is more economic to buy barrels of fish from one of two companies that now process herring for all of Sweden. They buy herring and cure it in a brine in which, for every thirteen kilos of salt, nine kilos of sugar are added.

  Women preparing herring for canning in Klädesholmen in the 1920s.

  Klädesholmens Museum

  At the big herring plants, decisions about these formulas are still made by the brine mixer, who, like the master salters on the old-time cod vessels, has the highest salary.

  But life has changed in all of Sweden. Until a lumber boom in the mid–nineteenth century it was one of Europe’s poorest countries. Before the 1960s and 1970s, the only refrigeration in a Swedish kitchen was cabinets with holes to the outdoors in the wall. Historically, salted provisions got Sweden through its long winters, and traditional Scandinavian food is very salty. A Swedish sausage is coated in a white layer of salt. In Sweden, Äppelfläsk used to be made in the fall when the apples came in. They were sliced and sauteed in salt pork and sugar syrup. But today, everywhere in Scandinavia, as in much of the rest of northern Europe and North America, people are eating less salt and less salted foods. Few eat Äppelfläsk anymore.

  Some of the disappearing uses of salt seem so strange it is difficult to understand why they were ever popular. Snus is tobacco and salt. It was molded into a wad with the fingers, jammed up between the cheek and gum, and sucked on for an entire day; fresheners were added every hour or so. Some even put it in before going to bed and woke up at night for a fresh wad. And even the Swedes wonder at the habit of the Laplander in the far north, drinking salted coffee.

  SALT CONSUMPTION IS declining in most of the world. The average twentieth-century European consumed half as much salt as the average nineteenth-century European. But there is still a love of salt cod, herring, hams, sausages, olives, pickles, duck, and goose preserved in salt—foods that are no longer necessary. Salt cod is sometimes sold only slightly salted so that it requires less soaking, though this convenience is at the expense of quality. Some salt cod is so lightly salted that it is kept frozen, which makes little sense economically or gastronomically. Bacon and salted beef remain popular but, because they are now refrigerated, are no longer so salted that they need to be soaked before using. Since salt curing has lost its function as a way to preserve meat, the paradoxical notion of “fresh ham” has appeared. By Swedish law, a ham that is salted in September cannot be called a “fresh Christmas ham.” But a ham that is frozen in September and thawed and salted on December 17 is a “fresh Christmas ham.”

  In North America, the Jewish delicatessen is a citadel of salt-preserved foods—foods that could just as easily be purchased fresh, including pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, salted and smoked salmon, carp, whitefish, and sable, and cured meats such as tongue, pastrami, and corned beef. Pastrami, of Romanian origin, is dried, spiced, and salted beef, smoked over hardwood sawdust and then steamed. The name may come from pastra, the Romanian verb “to preserve.” It is available in every delicatessen, but most famously as the specialty of Schwartz’s in Montreal. Schwartz’s and its pastrami is such an institution in Montreal that after the controversial 1977 Bill 101 required store names to be in French—a language that does not use apostrophes—Schwartz’s was one of the few allowed to keep its apostrophe. But it had to change from being a “Hebrew delicatessen” to a charcuterie Hébraïque.

  While the Jews and the delicatessens are concentrated in eastern North America, much of their fish is taken from the Pacific. Great Lakes carp is becoming rarer, and an inexpensive substitute was salted and smoked sable or sablefish, a huge, deepwater Pacific fish. In the Pacific Northwest, it is known as black cod, though it is nothing like a cod and belongs to a uniquely northern Pacific family. Now that it has become fashionable in the United States and Japan to eat black cod, it is becoming rarer too and cured sable is no longer inexpensive.

  Though curing salmon is an ancient tradition everywhere that the fish is found, Jews who learned of it in Germany and central Europe, where it had long been a popular food, did much to popularize it in the world. It was through the Jewish immigrant neighborhoods of Paris after World War II that cured salmon became a staple item of Paris charcuteries. In New York also, it was the early-twentieth-century central European Jews of Manhattan’s crowded Lower East Side who first established cured salmon as a New York food and then an American food.

  The popular Jewish cured salmon was called lox, Yiddish for salmon, from the German lachs. Lox is salt-cured salmon, usually Pacific salmon. In the nineteenth century, the Pacific Northwest became a leading center for cured salmon for both the East and West. The booming fur trade of the region bought large quantities of salt. The merchants in the Northwest found that salted salmon sold well in the world and that the ships bringing in salt could buy salted salmon for their return cargo.

  Hawaii was a salt supplier for the Northwest. Like many Pacific islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hawaii had an important trade provisioning whalers and other ships with salt and salted meats. Hawaii produced sea salt in inland lakes, the most famous of which was a volcanic crater rumored to be bottomless—evidently not true since the drained salt lake is now in Honolulu filled with high-rise buildings. Hawaiians traded salt in the Northwest and in turn bought salted salmon, a hard product that required soaking like salt cod. Hawaiians still mix soaked salt salmon with tomatoes, a dish they call lomilomi. The word means “massage” and refers to the process of flaking the salt fish.

  Salt-cured lox, once the leading cured salmon, has in recent years been almost completely abandoned for the less salty Nova, a lighter cure, soaked in brine and then smoked. In recent decades there has been a mantra among Jewish shoppers, “Get the Nova; the lox is too salty.” The name comes from Nova Scotia, though most Nova originally came from the nearby Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec. Now there is western Nova, made from Pacific salmon, because Atlantic salmon has all but disappeared except for farmed varieties. Moe Greengrass, owner of a popular Jewish smoked fish store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side started by his father in 1929, said, “Nobody buys lox anymore—we sell 100 pounds of Nova and 5 pounds of lox per week.” Moe’s father, Barney, who had worked in fish stores on the Lower East Side before opening his West Side store, was one of those who had made lox a New York food back when New Yorkers liked their fish salty.

  ANCHOVY IS A fish that has remained more popular salted than fresh, but because salting is no longer a necessity, it has become considerably less salty. J.-B. Reboul, the nineteenth-century Provençal chef, is credited as one of the first to use anchovies creatively, inventing anchovy patés and several pastries with anchovy fillings. He also wrote one of the great recipes of a Provençal classic: anchoïade.

  After having washed seven or eight anchovies, let them soak several minutes in water to desalinate; having separated the fillets from their bones place them in a dish with several spoonfuls of olive oil, a pinch of pepper, two or three garlic cloves chopped fine, you could also add a splash of vinegar.

  Cut a slice about one inch off the top of a pain de ménage [or pain ordinaire—a long, round, typical French bread]. This is the best choice of bread because it does not easily crumble.

  Divide this long slice of bread into two or three pieces: they should be the same. Make one for each guest. Place some anchovy fillets on each piece and arrang
e the pieces in a dish.

  Cut the remaining bread into small squares. Everybody dips the squares in the prepared oil and then uses the square to crush the fillets on the bread. When it is all crushed together, anchovy and sauce, you eat the squares of bread that were used for crushing while toasting the slices with crushed anchovy on top; it releases typical flavor that fills with joy all lovers of Provençal cooking and gives pleasure to many a gourmet.—J.-B. Reboul, La cuisinière Provençale, 1910

  Another celebrated nineteenth-century Provençal chef, M. Morard, wrote, “The laziest of stomachs and the sleepiest of appetites are obviously forced to awaken at the first mouthful of this stimulating slice of bread, made golden with olive oil, awaiting crushed anchovy fillets and chopped garlic, that the culinary mosaic-maker has so perfectly placed on top.”

  IN 1905, HENRI Matisse and André Derain went to Collioure, the little pink-and-yellow village by the sea, still famous for its anchovies. In one of the most fruitful summers in the history of art, they produced paintings of furious colors. Derain painted a village of pure primary color and Matisse a village of vibrant opposites, turquoise and orange, magenta and gold. They took their paintings to Paris’s Salon d’Automne that year and created a sensation, a movement in the art world known as fauvism.

  Visit the little port of Collioure today, a few miles up the Catalan coast from the Spanish border, and these works of Matisse and Derain will seem purely imaginary. Collioure is no longer a world of brilliant colors but subtle pastel walls where wisteria blooms pale purple and magnolia pink.

  What is missing are the fishing boats.

  Derain painted them red and yellow, their bright red masts poking out of the harbor like an autumn grove. Matisse depicted them in a red bunch seen from his turquoise window. They were exaggerating the colors, but the fishing boats, called catalans, truly were painted in blazing primary colors. These were the boats of anchovy fishermen.