Salt

Finished Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History last night. I'm glad I read it, though I have some reservations about recommending it. The book was chock-full of random facts about salt, its manufacture, and its commerce, and by extension, its impact on the social and political history of the world. In fact, this is Kurlansky's central thesis, to the extent the book has one – salt was so central to so much at so many different times and places throughout history, that we can credit it with the state in which we currently find our world.

The main reason salt was so significant, in his view, is because it was the first, and the most widespread, food preservative. This made perishable food transportable, and therefore a tradeable commodity, spurring commerce that could be conducted beyond the limits of one's immediate community. Unfortunately, this central theme of the book is only obvious in retrospect. The narrative is not well organized, and has nothing unifying the different chapters and sections other than that they all in some way have to do with salt. Kurlansky jumps from factoid to factoid, seemingly at random. Sometimes, he makes a ninety-degree turn in the space of a single page, as if he just thought of something peripherally related to what he was just writing about, but had to set it down before he forgot it.

To be fair, the book does have its strong points, the main one being his thorough research into original sources, especially pre-modern cookbooks. He quotes copiously from everyone starting with Appicius and Pliny the Elder, on through the medieval Mensajer de Paris, up to modern chefs, and he ventures into non-Western, especially ancient Chinese, sources along the way. Some of these recipes are gems – it really gives you a look into how a kitchen functioned in the days before refrigeration, gas cooking or any sort of domestic technology.

I did learn a few things. The most significant, perhaps, is the fact that Gandhi's original issue over which he galvanized the Indian independence movement was a protest against Imperial Britain's oppressive salt-making and salt-taxing policies. I had no idea. Another bit that made me chuckle: the gourmet “colored” salts, the gray sea salt and the red salt, so prized by foodies who pay exorbitant prices for them, acquire their color from impurities, in most cases dirt or clay. While I understand the objection to chemical purification of any food product, I'm not sure I want clay to be the flavor-giving ingredient in my food. I also learned that La Baleine, the French sea salt that comes in slender blue containers that I use daily in my cooking, is made by Morton's, the girl-with-umbrella juggernaut of salt. It does appear to be true to its labeling in that it is sea salt, and it is made in France, in the historical salt-producing region of Aigues-Mortes, but it turns out there is a gray area surrounding the term "sea salt" in general. There are two ways to make salt, by evaporating salt water, and by mining rock salt underground. Kurlansky does mention that only eight percent of Morton's production is table salt, but he does not say how it's made and in what proportions. So the stuff in 89-cent round cardboard drums may in fact come from sea water too. It is the fact that La Baleine is made by natural evaporation in wide, flat beds, rather than by an evaporating machine, that makes it special.