Some meals stay with you long after you have licked your fingers clean. I was in a beautiful part of Thailand when a resident suggested that we have a meal on a floating restaurant by a lake. The place was picturesque enough, but what caught my breath was a whole fish that had been baked for us. It came crusted in a thick layer of salt that had solidified. We broke the crust, and from within the fish emerged — fresh and tender, sweet and spicy and, as you’d expect, delicious.
The image comes to my mind every time I open the pages of a wonderful book called Salt: A World History written by Mark Kurlansky. A copy of the book was gifted to me quite a few years ago, and while I know it’s there somewhere, hidden in some dark corner, I still ordered a new copy last week. I wanted to read it because I had been thinking about salt.
Flowery aroma
I got hooked on to salts when a friend introduced me to fleur de sel or flower of salt, harvested from Guérande in France. The friend sprinkled a few grains, which had a wonderfully light flowery aroma, over boiled prawns. And the prawns tasted like heaven on earth.
It’s strange, isn’t it, what salt can do to food, and how we tend to undermine it? A French folktale talks about a princess who told her father she loved him like salt. The king was hurt and sent her away. Later, of course, he realised its value once he was denied salt.
“Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilisation until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history,” writes Kurlansky. His book tells you everything you wanted to know about salt, but were afraid to ask. It tells you that salt was produced in China in 6000 BC. One of the earliest verifiable saltworks in prehistoric China was in the northern province of Shanxi; the earliest written reference is from 800 BC.
Sensual obsession
He mentions that Welsh Jungian psychologist Ernest Jones, friend of Sigmund Freud, published an essay in 1912 about the human obsession with salt, which he believed was often associated with fertility. “This notion may have come from the observation that fish, living in the salty sea, have far more offspring than land-based animals. Ships carrying salt tended to be overrun by mice, and for centuries it was believed that mice could reproduce without sex, simply by being in salt,” Kurlansky writes.
There is an interesting chapter about salt and India called Salt and the Great Soul.
While he talks about many instances through history where rulers and the elite tried to deprive the poor of salt, I was struck by this extract from an 1822 book called The Cook and Housekeeper’s Complete and Universal Dictionary by Mary Eaton. “One of the greatest grievances of which the poor man can complain is the want of salt. Many of the insurrections and commotions among the Hindoos have been occasioned by the cruel and unjust monopolies of certain unworthy servants of the East India Company, who to aggrandise their own fortunes have often times bought up, on speculation, all the salt in the different ports and markets,” she wrote.
On another note, do you know that an adult human being contains about 250g of salt, which needs replenishing? This book, let me tell you, is not to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The writer, who grew up on ghee-doused urad dal and roti, now likes reading and writing about food as much as he enjoys cooking and eating.
Well, almost.