My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of
the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read
it years before I started writing book reviews. When the library
selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History
recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to
read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world
history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484
pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of
survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with
food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application
of salt.
In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the
importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of
salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on
top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they
mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.
As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of
world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I
didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World,
although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's
oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made
a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes
forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index
to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that
in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from
Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and
preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers
preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.
The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached
North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic,
these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was
surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque
History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the
Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by
supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food
preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The
discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have
happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich
non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:
"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it
rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland
were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of
northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with
salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine
in many parts of Europe."
Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways
different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more
often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method
was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for
different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced
in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather
for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada
and the USA to the location of salt:
"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the
whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map
reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected
haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply
widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals
looking for salt."
Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt
than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins
of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader
Joe's.
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