It took about 90 minutes after arriving to see family for Thanksgiving before I realized that I use an awful lot of salt.
I had time to drop my bags in the foyer before I had to go to the kitchen and prepare a brine for the turkey to soak in for a full three days before cooking. After fiddling with my eleven herbs and spices, I dumped in the 1.5 cups of soy sauce and the 1.5 cups of salt, finished up, wiped my hands and was surprisingly given a late birthday present:
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing. Of course, every recipe called for what seemed like a brick of salt about the size of an infant.
None of this seems odd to me at all. My wife and I already corn our own beef, pickle ginger and cornichons, and make cheese. I'm not really sure why (besides their tasting good). I suppose it just sounded neat and snowballed into a habit. What's always interesting to me, as I do things like this, is thinking about the sea change that occurred in food transportation and storage to turn these processes of preservation from vital practices for sustenance, around the globe, to, at least here, a quaint first-world hobby.
Mark Kurlansky's Salt, A World History reacquaints readers with a mineral we now take for granted or view as objectionable. Despite being vital for survival both internally (without it our nervous systems would misfire, and we'd essentially collapse on the cellular level) and sanitarily (curing food), it's now seen as little more than the harbinger of bad food preparation and early death. Kurlansky's aim is to show that salt not only keeps us going but has propelled the world such as to bring us to where we are today.
Kurlansky's book begins with a few biological basics of salt and survival before taking the reader through the impact of salt in ancient history. Most readers will be astonished to learn of the sophistication of chinese bamboo drilling and pneumatic pumping of briny water 250 years before Christ. To continue the theme of the Thanksgiving table and the pre-Christian era, the cured hams on the family spread are probably little changed from those prized by the Celts who faced Caesar in Gaul and which were considered exquisite even in the Roman world. Speaking of which, few food-related chapters you read may be as nauseating as the one on Roman garum, a brown paste made from salt and rotted/cured fish parts that was almost viewed as a vital food lubricant. Although the description might remind some of authentic Vietnamese fish paste, garum seems rancid beyond analogue. (Between microbreweries bottling meads according to ancient deciphered recipes and the increase in therapeutic use of myrrh, look for "authentic" garum to appear at Whole Foods at $15 per six-ounce jar in just a few years — that is, assuming it can even legally be sold to people as food.)
From there,
Salt takes us to the invention of cheeses and meats in Parma (parmesan and prosciutto di parma, respectively), to the Venetian salt fleets, to Basque salted cod and the Roman Catholic injunction against beef on Fridays that helped to popularize the fish. From there it's just a skip to Mediterranean French salts and thus then to French cheeses, French choucroute/German sauerkraut, product dissemination via Hanseatic League, tinned herrings and Scandinavia.
If it seems all over the place, that's because at times it is. Kurlansky had to pick and choose where and when to talk about salt, because anything like a comprehensive account from the dawn of history to the present, just in Europe, would have taken thousands of pages. Instead, he takes the reader from the tastiest or more interesting points to the next, which can sometimes lead the narrative astray in service of interesting connections. In many respects, Kurlansky is writing on his belly and hoping to lead you by the nose (honestly, mind you), from one enticing idea to the next.
There are plenty to find in the book, beginning with etymologies like the word salary and the phrase "worth his salt" both originating in Roman soldiers being paid in salt because of its tremendous value, and ending in industrial salt mining and tiny boutique cooking salts shipped to your door in days. Along the way we learn of salt's role in anti-mercantile outrage in the North American colonies, populist outrage in pre-revolutionary France and anti-imperialist outrage in the waning years of Britain's Indian empire.
All of these are fascinating short stories, interludes, factoids, what have you, but they often feed into overarching determinist narratives about the role of salt in the formation of human governments or movements. If Kurlansky wrote about salt qua salt, this book would be no less fascinating, but it would also be less academically shaky. Perhaps because he's become so engrossed by his topic or because he wants to impress upon the reader the vital necessity and interest that salt once had prior to the 20th century, Kurlansky magnifies its role in conflicts while minimizing other socioeconomic factors. Salt might have been a valuable good, but in revolutionary America, France and anti-colonialist India, it's mostly a metaphor. Had it not existed, the metaphor would have been something else. Likewise, had Mr. McIlhenny not owned salt mines, there would still be hot sauce: it just might not be called Tabasco.
The book does have a few other quirks whose importance varies by reader. I have no head for geology or chemistry, but I'm told the author flubs details about both at times. The book also wanders freely from topic to topic, and sometimes Kurlansky is obliged to repeat concepts from which he previously jumped away. If you're a compulsive reader who likes to charge through a book, these passages can become noticeable. On the other hand, if you read only a few pages at night before going to sleep, divide your library up into specific books for specific purposes (like "lunch break" books, for one) or primarily listen to audiobooks, the repetition helps anchor ideas and keep you up to speed on multiple threads.
Really, though, the geology, the chemistry and the macrohistorical ideas at best vie for second place behind the food. Succulent-seeming and utterly gross recipes begin chapters, crop up in their middles and receive detailed analysis in abundance. You could probably feed a Viking landing party just off half the book's menu alone.
This is the stuff that's the most fun, taking the familiar and dragging us back into its past to show the techniques that kept our ancestors alive, fed them through winters by — excuse this — salting away food surpluses for seasons without growth. Kurlanksy manages to vivify the process of simply eating sauerkraut, your average ballpark hot-dog topping, by showing how it was not the product of some perversely sour German diet but rather a vital means of preserving cabbages. What we (living in such luxury that salt garnishes food rather than needing to be cooked out of it) mistake for cultural eccentricity or "odd taste" was often little more than survival. To keep the abusive puns coming, it's what we've chosen to preserve from those traditions, in the absence of the need for non-refrigerated preservation, that makes us the eccentrics.
If nothing else, Kurlansky's book allows us to recognize — as we look round Thanksgiving tables at brined turkeys and cured hams and pickled vegetables — that what we dismiss as an inessential, simplistic and deadly seasoning is actually crucial and responsible for some of the most unique, bizarre, wonderful and diverse foods in the world.
ahh, I came late to this review but well worth it. If you are talking about Kurlansky's Salt, I share your iffy enthusiasm for it - sometimes I like it more than others. If you are referring to the
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing book, I admit I would not read it myself, but it is quite the perfect surprise gift for my brother-in-law, who makes his own gravlax, pickles cornichons, brines many meats, and has corned his own beef. I think there is some pastrami ambition for the corned beef as well, but that's just smoke on the horizon at this point.
Thanks for the tip on this book! And the endorsement of salt. I have perfectly fine blood pressure no matter what I eat and I put sea salt my choco chip cookes. Which makes them taste awesome.
