Salt (17 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Friday’s Salt

B
Y THE SEVENTH
century
A.D.
, all of western Europe spoke Indo-European languages—languages that stemmed from the Bronze Age Asian invasion of Europe—except for the Basques. In their small mountainous land on the Atlantic coast, partly in what was to become Spain and partly in the future France, Basque culture, language, and laws had survived all the great invasions, including those of the Celts and the Romans.

The Basques were different. One of those differences was that they hunted whales. They were the first commercial whale hunters, ahead of all others by several centuries. The earliest record of commercial whaling is a bill of sale from the year 670 to northern France for forty pots of whale oil from the Basque coastal province of Labourd, which is now in France.

Through the centuries of commercial whaling that would follow, the oil boiled from whale fat would be the most consistently valuable part of the whale. Whalebone was also profitable, especially the hundreds of teeth, which were a particularly durable form of ivory. But, in the Middle Ages, Basque fortunes were made trading the tons of fat and red meat that could be stripped from each whale.

The medieval Catholic Church forbade the eating of meat on religious days, and, in the seventh century, the number of these days was dramatically expanded. The Lenten fast, a custom started in the fourth century, was increased to forty days, and in addition all Fridays, the day of Christ’s crucifixion, were included. In all, about half the days of the year became “lean” days, and food prohibitions for these days were strictly enforced. Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. The law remained on the books until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with the Vatican.

On lean days sex was forbidden, and eating was to be limited to one meal. Red meat was “hot” and therefore banned because it was associated with sex. However, animals found in water—which included the tails but not the bodies of beavers, sea otters, porpoises, and whales—were deemed cool, and acceptable food for religious days.

For this reason, porpoise is included in most medieval food manuscripts. But the recipes usually call for costly ingredients, indicating that porpoise was not food for the poor. The following English recipe, with its expensive Asian spices, is from a manuscript dated between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though the recipe may be much older.

PURP YN GALENTEYN

Take purpays: do away the skyn; cut hit yn smal lechys [slices] no more than a fynger, or les. Take bred drawen wyth red wyne; put therto powder of canell [cinnamon], powder of pepyr. Boil hit; seson hit up with powder of gynger, venegre, & salt.

Fresh whale meat was also for the rich. The great delicacy was the tongue. Salted tongue of any kind was appreciated, but especially whale tongue. For the poor, there was
craspois,
also called
craspoix,
or
grapois
. This was strips of the fattier parts of the whale, salt-cured like bacon and sometimes called in French
lard de carême,
which translates as “lent blubber,” because it was one of the principal foods available to the peasantry for lean days on which other red meats were not allowed. Even after a full day of cooking, craspoix was said to be tough and hard. It was eaten with peas, which was the way the rich ate their whale tongue. Nevertheless, Rouen merchants who sold craspoix to the English paid high tariffs at London Bridge, which suggests this salted whale blubber was a luxury product in England. This would not be the last time the food of French peasants was sold as a treat for wealthy Englishmen.

In 1393, an affluent and elderly Parisian, whose name has been lost, published a lengthy volume of instructions to his fifteen-year-old bride on the running of a household. The book, known as
Le mèsnagier de Paris,
offers this recipe:

Craspoix. This is salted whale meat. It should be cut in slices uncooked and cooked in water like fatback: serve it with peas.

Peas at the time were dried and cooked as beans are today, so that this dish resembled pork and beans.

On lean days, when the peas are cooked, you have to take onions that have been cooked in a pot for as long as the peas, exactly the same way that on meat days, lard is cooked separately in the pot and then peas and stock added. In that same way, on a lean day, at the time the peas are put in a pot on the fire, you should put finely chopped onions and in a separate pot cook the peas. When everything is cooked, fry the onions, put half in the peas and half in the stock—and salt. If that day is during Lent get crapoix and use it the same way that lard is used on meat days.—Le mèsnagier de Paris,
1393

B
Y THE SEVENTH
century, the Basques built stone towers on high points of land along their coast. The remains of two still stand. When the lookout in the tower spied a whale, its great shiny black back breaking the surface while spouting vapor, he would shout a series of coded cries that told whalers where and how big the whale was, and how many other whales were nearby. Five oarsmen, a captain, and a harpooner would silently row out, hoping to spear the giant unaware. The Basques, who have always had a reputation for physical strength, made their harpooners legendary—large men of great power who could plunge a spear deep into the back of a sleeping giant.

By the ninth century, when the Basques had a well-established whaling business, an intruder arrived—the Vikings.
Viking
is a term—thought to have its root in the old Norse
vika,
meaning “to go off”—for Scandinavians who left their native land to seek wealth in commerce. They did not have a central location like Genoa or Venice, and their northern home provided them with little to trade. If they had had a source of salt, they might have traded salted meats like the Celts or salted fish like the Phoenicians. But without salt, meat and fish were too perishable, and all the Vikings had to trade were tools made from walrus tusk and reindeer antler. In search of a trading commodity, they raided coastal communities in northern Europe, kidnapped people, and sold them into slavery, which is why they are still remembered for their brutality.

But they were ingenious people, superb shipbuilders, intrepid mariners, and savvy traders. For their captured slaves, they received payment in silver, silks, glassware, and other luxuries that transformed life for the upper classes in Scandinavia. With their fast-sailing ships, they raided the coasts of Britain and France. Starting in 845, these raids turned into campaigns involving large groups. Vikings held territory in the vicinity of the Thames and Loire Rivers, which they used as bases for both raiding and trading at even greater distances. They traded with Russia, Byzantium, and the Middle East. Great European cities, including both London and Paris, paid the Vikings to be left in peace.

The ninth-century Vikings also maintained a base along the Adour River on the northern border of Basque provinces. No records exist of the Vikings teaching shipbuilding to the Basques. But at the time the Vikings built better ships because their hulls were constructed with overlapping planks. And it is known that about that time, the Basques started building their hulls the same way and soon had a reputation as the best shipbuilders in Europe.

With their sturdy, new, long-distance ships equipped with enormous storage holds, the Basques were no longer limited to the whale’s winter grounds in their native Bay of Biscay. They loaded their rowboats onto ships and traveled more than 1,000 miles. By 875, only one generation after the arrival of the Vikings in their land, the Basques made the 1,500-mile journey to the Viking’s Faroe Islands.

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, along with its relatives including haddock and whiting, 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.

Had the Vikings told the Basques about cod or perhaps even sold them some? The Vikings knew the cod well from Scandinavian waters. Less than a century after arriving in the Adour, a band of Vikings settled Iceland and then moved on to Greenland and from there, by the year 1000, to Newfoundland. They caught cod as they went and dried it in the arctic air. Realizing that dried cod was a tradable commodity, they soon established drying stations in Iceland to produce the export.

But the Basques had spent centuries surrounded by the Roman Empire, where salted fish was a common food, which is probably why they thought of salt-curing whale meat. Now they started salting cod. The market was enormous. All of the formerly Roman world ate salt fish, and the Basques had a salt fish to sell that, after a day or more of soaking in fresh water, was whiter, leaner, and better, according to many, than the dark, oily, Mediterranean species that had been used before. Being a fatless fish, air-dried and salt-cured, salt cod, stiff as planks of wood, could be stacked on wagons and hauled over roads, even in warm Mediterranean climates. It was better than crapoix and equally affordable, and being a fish, was Church-approved for holy days. For those who desired a more extravagant cuisine, it only needed rich ingredients to dress it up.

Guillaume Tirel, known as Taillevent, was the head chef for King Charles V of France, to whom he introduced cabbage. In the tradition of great French chefs, he worked his way up from a childhood in a royal kitchen in Normandy, assisting bellows tenders and spit turners rotating enormous roasts, and he hoisted and lowered the chains holding huge stockpots. Included in his menial jobs as a boy apprentice was desalinating salted meats, regarded as one of the basic skills of an accomplished cook. His nickname Taillevent meant “jib,” which is a small, fast, and versatile sail. Four different versions of his manuscript—scrolls of recipes titled
Le viandier
—have been found, all of uncertain dates, but since the working life of Taillevent was from 1330 to 1395, and these were the recipes he used,
Le viandier
is thought to predate
Le mèsnagier de Paris,
making it the oldest known French cookbook.

In
Le viandier
, Taillevent wrote that “Salt cod is eaten with mustard sauce or with melted fresh butter over it.”
Le mèsnagier de Paris
borrowed the exact same prescription but added what even today is the best advice on preparing salt cod: “Salt cod that has been too little soaked is too salty; that which has soaked too long is not good. Because of this you must, as soon as you buy it, put it to the test of your teeth, and taste a little bit.”