A SHORT ESSAY ON MARK KURLANSKY’S BOOK ‘SALT’
(This is a terrific book. Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky. (Penguin, 2002).
In 15th century Poland, they preserved game by gutting the animal in question (a rabbit, perhaps; a stray deer) and rubbing the cavity with salt and gunpowder. Gunpowder being a variant salt compound. In Sweden, girls would eat salty pancakes, then go to bed thirsty so they could dream of future thirst-quenching husbands. According to Tacitus, certain Germanic tribes believed that gods, whomever they were then, listened to prayers somewhat more if they were offered in salt mines. The prayers, that is; not the people being offered up, which is what it amounted to if you were a slave in a salt mine. They used to build whole cities out of salt in the sub-Saharan deserts. White palaces that probably looked like cathedrals from outer space, if you could see them from there–with the Luxor hotel and the Great Wall of China and all the angels burning up in the atmosphere. But they weren’t palaces; they were prisons built from calcium and sand in which the slaves went mad overnight. The history of salt, not unlike the history of everything else, is one, of course, of economics.
In England, they mined so much salt, impossibly close together, that the earth would collapse into itself, falling into the eroding and abandoned salt mines like soft fault lines. And Jericho—the oldest town in the world—was the center of the salt trade. (Lot’s wife was, of course, transformed into a pillar salt for what: recalcitrance? A need to check her ovens, the locks on her doors, her perfect calcium children?) Mount Sodom was made out of almost pure salt. They carved it into gothic pinnacles before they destroyed it by being human.
The Dead Sea is 26% dissolved minerals, 99% of which are salt. The ocean, by contrast, is 3% salt. During the Cultural Revolution (it was neither) in China, they turned Chiang Kai-shek’s local headquarters into a salt museum. They decorated it with pictures of Mao. Salt being, of course, one of the principle engines of Chinese civilization. (Other than clocks and rice and pasta—Marco Polo was a terrible revisionist—and most other things.)
Here’s a recipe for potted frog, which demonstrates, among other things, the importance of salt, both as an ingredient in cooking (which this was) and in the empirical universe they lived in. The frogs, of course, did not. (Live.)
Soaked Frog, a specialty of Zigong salt merchants:
“A few pieces of wood would be floated in a large jar of brine. Live frogs would be put in the jar, and they would desperately perch on the pieces of wood. The jar was closed and sealed. After six months, the jar would be opened and the frogs would be dead and dried on the wood but preserved because they had dipped in the salt. They would then be steamed” (Kurlansky, 377).
Salt defined the world for quite some time. Now, with the invention of refrigeration and new Orwellian systems of preservation, it doesn’t so much. Instead of salting men for virility (it didn’t work) and children for protection (it didn’t either), we have diabetes and high blood pressure and obesity in record numbers. Salt, of course, is hardly responsible for this. Because we were the ones who sifted the oceans for it, dug up the bone cities and burnt it off the Saharan wind farms. That we invented too.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
