The process by which the Chinese, and later the Japanese, fermented beans in earthen pots is today known as lactic acid fermentation, or, in more common jargon, pickling.
As vegetables begin to rot, the sugars break down and produce lactic acid, which serves as a preservative. Theoretically, pickling can be accomplished without salt, but the carbohydrates and proteins in the vegetables tend to putrefy too quickly to be saved by the emerging lactic acid. Without salt, yeast forms, and the fermentation process leads to alcohol rather than pickles.
The Phoenicians are also credited with the first alphabet. Chinese and Egyptian languages used pictographs, drawings depicting objects or concepts. Babylonian, which became the International language in the Middle East, also had a long list of characters, each standing for a word or combination of sounds.
It is a sad fate for a people to be defined for posterity by their enemies.
The Romans salted their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.
In those cold, distant, northern waters, they discovered something more profitable than whaling: the Atlantic cod. This large bottom feeder preserves unusually well because its white flesh is almost entirely devoid of fat. Fat resists salt and slows the rate at which salt impregnates fish. This is why oily fish, after salting, must be pressed tightly in barrels to be preserved, whereas cod can be simply laid in salt. Also, fatty fish cannot be exposed to air in curing because the fat will become rancid. Cod can be air-dried before salting, which makes for a particularly effective cure that would be difficult with oily fish such as anchovy or herring.
One group of Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second group remained in the Faroe Islands. 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. Soon the Vikings had vanished.
The Polish Crown earned one-third of its annual revenues from the salt of these 2 mines near Cracow, Wieliczka and Bochnia.
Even true industrialization had overtaken England, the industrial degradation of the environment was an accepted way of life in Cheshire. Cheshire merchants would look with pride at the sky, blackened 24 hours a day from clouds of smoke from the salt pan furnaces, and note the industriousness of their region.
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.”
Geologists searched the globe for likely salt domes to drill. Many of them were found in the Persian Gulf. In 1908, oil was found in Persia, now Iran, in the places where Herodotus had written about salt.
Cheshire is now green English countryside. It is hard to believe that 100 years ago the sky was black with coal smoke, the horizon filled with a hundred smokestacks, the oil contaminated, arid, barren, and scarred white where the pan scale was dumped.
Salt had to pay a duty to cross this line. He was able to get taxes dropped on a series of lesser items, including tobacco, so that customs officers could concentrate on salt smuggling. Customs officers were given that always disastrous combination of broad powers and low pay.
But life has changed in all of Sweden. Until a lumber boom in the mid-19th century it was one of Europe’s poorest countries. Before the 1960s and 1970s, the only refrigeration in a Swedish kitchen was cabinets with holes to the outdoors in the wall. Historically, salted provisions got Sweden through its long winters, and traditional Scandinavian food is very salty. But today, people are eating les salt and less salted foods.
But little of this is table salt. In the US, only 8% of salt production is for food. The largest single use, 51%, is for deicing roads.
But today this dirty salt, “alaea red salt,” is widely available, sought after by fine chefs and would be gourmets.
Gray salts, black salts, salts with any visible impurities are sought out and marketed for their colors, even though the tint usually means the presence of dirt. Like the peasants in Sichuan, many consumers distrust modern factory salt. They would rather have a little mud than iodine, magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, or other additives, some of which are merely imagined.