Salt: A World History

In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.

Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means “one who lives in hiding or under cover.” The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning “salt.” They were the salt people.

The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.

The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans.

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the corpse did not get a trial date and was found by a prison guard more than seven years later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial.

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution.

The Chinese had first learned of the Roman Empire in 139 B.C., when the emperor Wudi had sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, past the deserts to seek allies to the west. Zhang Qian traveled for twelve years to what is now Turkistan and back and reported on the astounding discovery that there was a fairly advanced civilization to the west. In 104 B.C. and 102 B.C., Chinese armies reached the area, a former Greek kingdom called Sogdiana with its capital in Samarkand, where they met and defeated a force partly composed of captive Roman soldiers.

In nineteenth-century Russia, sauerkraut was valued more than caviar,

In 1352, Ibn Batuta, the greatest Arab-language traveler of the Middle Ages, who had journeyed overland across Africa, Europe, and Asia, reported visiting the city of Taghaza, which, he said, was entirely built of salt, including an elaborate mosque.

In the Middle Ages, adultery was thought to be a major cause of the herring leaving.

In the first century A.D., Pliny estimated that the average Roman citizen consumed only 25 grams of salt a day. The modern American consumes even less if the salt content of packaged food is not included.

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.

For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word sterling, which meant “of assured value.

It takes two years for the salt to reach the center of a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

When these early settlers hunted, they would leave red herring along their trail because the strong smell would confuse wolves, which is the origin of the expression red herring, meaning “a false trail.

That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer. This meant that the Venetian public was paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade. When grain harvests failed in Italy, the Venetian government would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.

One of the gabelle’s most irritating inventions was the sel du devoir, the salt duty. Every person in the Grande Gabelle over the age of eight was required to purchase seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of salt each year at a fixed high government price. This was far more salt than could possibly be used, unless it was for making salt fish, sausages, hams, and other salt-cured goods. But using the sel du devoir to make salted products was illegal, and, if caught, the perpetrator would be charged with the crime of faux saunage, salt fraud, which carried severe penalties. Many simple acts were grounds for a charge of faux saunage. In the Camargue, shepherds who let their flocks drink the salty pond water could be charged with avoiding the gabelle.

Mohandas’s marriage, which was arranged when he was thirteen, lasted for the next sixty-two years. Despite his enduring reputation for living a life of simplicity and self-denial, he did not come to this easily and struggled in his youth with uncontrolled appetites, both sexual and gastronomic. In violation of his family’s religious code, he experimented with meat eating, hoping it would make him large and strong like the carnivorous English.

Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.

When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks eaten by humans.

The Egyptians of 4000 B.C. believed that the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, taught them how to grow olives. The Greeks have a similar legend. But the Hebrew word for olive, zait, is probably older than the Greek word, elaia, and is thought to refer to Said in the Nile Delta.

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.

Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo.

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.

In 1411, the French Crown granted a patent declaring that only the cheese of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon could be called Roquefort cheese.

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.

At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, the Hanseatics were believed to have had at their command 40,000 vessels and 300,000 men.

It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller.