Today, thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing and searching for salt appear picaresque and slightly foolish. The seventeenth-century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on French sea salt seem somehow more comic than contemporary leaders concerned with a dependence on foreign oil...
—Introduction, Salt: A World History
Go ahead. Sprinkle a little salt in your palm and reflect on its long history. Taste one of those tiny cubes, a flavor locked in our genes as desirable, immediately identifiable, unmistakable. Then throw a pinch over your shoulder, into the devil's eyes.
Salt, according to author Mark Kurlansky, has been used as a monetary basis, provoked wars, consecrated crowned heads and marriage vows, cured corpses and cucumbers, spiced food from China to Tierra del Fuego, underscored entire industries, and provided the root word for such modern essentials as "salami"—and "salary."
As he did in a previous work, Cod, with Salt: A World History, Kurlansky has focused on the far-reaching influence, current as well as historical, of a single commodity. Salt is the real "staff of life"; its presence in food transforms the rotting process to one of pickling or curing. Once the use of salt to preserve food was uncovered (and salt's use in pickling predates the 4000-year Chinese history), the demand for it in ancient societies was guaranteed.
Kurlansky looks at historical uses of salt, beginning with the earliest references from China to pickling vegetables in brine, derived from brine wells. Wells that provided water steeped in sodium chloride (table salt) gave the most pleasing flavor to fish and vegetables like soybeans, although bitter-brine (containing potassium chloride) and other salty brines were also used. The common condiment that began as a fermented fish sauce gradually mutated (with the addition of soybeans as filler) to the fermented bean sauce we know today as soy sauce.
Romans also fermented fish in brine, creating garum, a condiment that was dashed like catsup on nearly everything. Salt was so important to Roman society that "salt rights" (an early entitlement) were granted to appease the populace when other civil rights were revoked. Roman soldiers were issued a set amount of salt as part of their pay—the origin of the word "salary" and the phrase "worth his salt."
Article comments
1 - Walter Brooks
I'll find you whenever you review something with a Cape Cod connection. Your
current review is featured on CapeCodToday.com.
Walter Brooks, Editor & Publisher,
900 Route 134, Dennis, MA 02660
Newspaper: CapeCodToday.com
Magazine: CapeCodTravel.com
2 - ClubhouseCancer
I loved this book also, as I am a freak for these kind of theses:
We never give (product/concept/invention) a second thought today, but actually much of western civilization can be seen to depend on it.
Like some of the ones you link to, plus Longitude by Dava Sobel and Cod by this author (which are both highly recommended) and especially:
Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle by Stuart Isacoff.
This piano tuning book is nothing short of fascinating, and explains why you could be burned as a heretic if you tuned your piano in a certain fashion.
I am just starting that "color red" book you link to, and it seems like another for the genre.
Thanks for a fine review of this book. It led my eyes to emit a salty discharge.
3 - DrPat
I'll be reviewing another of this genre, the book about Perkin's discovery of coal-tar dyes (Mauve), just as soon as I get my copy back from my sister-in-law. (She borrowed it for a plane trip to Colorado, and she's not back yet.)
4 - Pat Cummings
This book review has been selected for Advance.net. You’ll be able to find this and other Blog Critics reviews at such places as Cleveland.com’s Book Reviews column.
5 - Bob Fulkerson
How am I to have faith in Mr. Kurlansky's research of historical matters when I find his understanding of current events and politics so abysmally wanting?
He's a supercilious twit who would have made some money off of me if he'd kept his cake hole shut regarding gw.
Whew!
I feel better.
haikubob
6 - DrPat
I admit to being puzzled by that last comment, Bob - where and when did Mark Kurlansky comment on President Bush? It certainly wasn't in the book I reviewed...
Usually the certainty works the other way around, as well; one's grasp (or lack thereof) of history calls one's opinions on current events into question.
7 - Marium
Ha HA go Pat. you get Bob in the face :))
btw. i am a high schooll student, doing an essay on Kurlansky's book, and this is very help ful.