Salt (20 page)

Take a salt eel and boil it tender, being flayed and trust round with scuers, boil it tender on a soft fire, then broil it brown, and serve it in a clean dish with two or three great onions boil’d whole and tender, and then broil’d brown; serve them on the eel with oyl and mustard in saucers.—
Robert May,
The Accomplisht Cook,
1685

The incentive of salt cod profits combined with improved artificial pond technology to greatly increase sea salt production, especially in France, but all along the Atlantic as well. And this increase in salt made more fish available. 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. The salt intake of Europeans, much of it in the form of salted fish, rose from forty grams a day per person in the sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Nordic Dream

I
N SOME PARTS
of Sweden it was “a dream porridge,” in others a pancake, that was made in silence and heavily salted. The custom was that the girl would eat this salty food and then go to sleep without drinking anything. As she slept, her future husband would come to her in a dream and give her water to quench her thirst.

No data are available on the success rate of Swedish girls using this system to find a mate. But the Swedish dream of salt is well documented. The Swedes had a wealth of herring but nothing with which to salt it.

One of the major commercial uses of salt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was to preserve herring, second only to salt cod, in the European lenten diet. Herring was such a dominant fish in the medieval market that in twelfth-century Paris saltwater fish dealers were called
harengères,
herring sellers.

Herring is a Clupeidae, a member of the same family of small, forked-tailed oily fish with a single dorsal fin as sardines. Anchovies are of a different family but of the same Clupeiforme order as sardines and herring. Even in ancient times, Mediterraneans knew about herring, though they may not have known it as a fresh fish, since it is from northern seas. The Greeks called it
alexium,
from the word
als
or
hals,
as in Hallstatt, meaning “salt.” But the people of the Mediterranean world never embraced the salted herring the way they did the salted cod, probably because they had their own clupeiformes. The fact that herring became a hugely successful item of trade in the fourteenth century is directly related to the fact that Atlantic nations, herring producers, were gaining power and controlling markets and commerce in a way they never had before. Antwerp and Amsterdam became leading ports of Europe, far exceeding Genoa and Venice in importance. And just as salt cod became essential to the British and French navies, Dutch ships, both for war and commerce, were provisioned with salt-cured herring.

Herring hide in ocean depths in winter, but in the spring until fall they rise and swim, sometimes thousands of miles, to their coastal spawning grounds. This phenomenon takes place from the Russian and Scandinavian Baltic, across the North Sea, as far south as northern France, and across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the Chesapeake Bay. Jules Michelet, the poetic nineteenth-century historian, wrote in
La Mer,
“A whole living world has just risen from the depths to the surface, following the call of warmth, desire, and the light.”

It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in
schools,
herring swim in
shoals,
a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root. A herring shoal consists of thousands of fish and, once located, provides an ample catch. But herring feed by gulping in seawater as they swim and filtering out minuscule zooplankton. They will search thousands of miles for these drifting beds of food, which means that a spot that had always been teeming with herring may suddenly one day be devoid of a single one, and they might not return to that spot for years. For the peoples of northern Europe who depended on herring, this could be a cataclysmic event, often blamed on the sins of the village folk. In the Middle Ages, adultery was thought to be a major cause of the herring leaving.

Herring had been a leading source of food for Scandinavians and other populations on the Baltic and North Sea for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found herring bones among 5,000-year-old Danish remains. What really happened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was not so much new ways of salting nor new ways of fishing but an increased supply of salt. This was especially important for herring because the salt had to be readily available for the fishery. Unlike the fat-free cod, herring must be salted within twenty-four hours of being lifted from the sea. This was an almost universally agreed upon and inviolable law of herring curing. In 1424, the count of Holland threatened to prosecute any fishermen who cured a herring that had been out of the water for more than twenty-four hours.

There was also an invention of sorts. The standard technique for preserving fish going back to Phoenician times was to gut it, dry it, and pack it in layers with salt. In 1350, Wilhelm Beuckelzon, a fisherman from Zeeland, the fishing center of south Holland—or in other accounts Wilhelm Beucks, a fish merchant in Flanders—started a practice of pickling herring in brine, fresh with no drying at all, and therefore the fish could be cured without the risk of its fat turning rancid from exposure to the air. For centuries, Europe’s powers, in their bids for control of the Lowlands, paid homage to Beuckelzon, the inventor of barreled herring. In 1506, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was raised in Flanders, visited Beuckelzon’s grave to honor his contribution to mankind. But in truth Beuckelzon’s invention ranks with Marco Polo’s discovery of pasta, or even Columbus’s discovery of America, as one of history’s more bogus tales.

At the time of Beuckelzon’s invention, herring already had been barreled in brine by the Scandinavians, the French, the Flemish, and the English for centuries. Nevertheless, the myth, like many myths, lived on. In 1856, Czar Alexander II of Russia erected a monument to the memory of a fourteenth-century Flemish fisherman named Benkels, who, he said, invented barrel-packed herring and then moved to Finland, thus spreading the idea to Scandinavia. These tributes, even if factually dubious, do speak to the importance northern nations attached to barreled brine-salted herring.

The booming medieval salt fish market was low end—lenten food for poor people. Upper-class people had their fish sped to them fresh, or if they lived too far from the water, had their royal fish ponds and holding tanks, or farmed fish such as carp. But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries an estimated 60 percent of all fish eaten by Europeans was cod, and a significant portion of the remaining 40 percent was herring.

Cured herring had an even lower standing than salted cod, and it was hated by many poor people who had nothing else to eat for holy days. The French way of saying that breeding will tell is
le caque sent toujours le hareng,
the barrel always smells of herring. In Brittany, a rock known to romantics as the Tomb of Almanzor, the legendary tomb of a lover who was drowned at sea, was laughingly known by Breton workers as
tombeau du hareng saur,
the tomb of the pickled herring, because it was where they ate their lunch.

But despite its low standing, fortunes could be made on furnishing the poor with herring. The herring was plentiful. Access to salt was the only limitation.

E
VAPORATING SEAWATER OVER
a fire was slow and costly, but northerners developed techniques to produce salt in gray, rainy climates. In northern Holland and southern Denmark, peat salt was made by burning peat that was impregnated with seawater. This ocean-soaked peat, known in Dutch as
zelle,
was dug from the tidal flats off the coast. The Dutch sometimes built temporary dikes to seal off an area while zelle was being harvested. It would be loaded on boats and carried to the mainland.

In the Middle Ages, Zeeland, the ocean-pocked estuary of the Schelde River in southern Holland, was a center for peat salt. Porters would carry the sea-logged peat to huts, where it was dried and burned. All that would remain would be ashes and salt. Saltwater was added, and it would absorb the salt in a brine and leave behind the ashes. The brine was then evaporated. When badly made, this produced an impure product known as black salt. But it could also produce a very white, fine-grained salt if the peat was not mixed with soil and if an unscrupulous salt maker had not bulked up his crystals by deliberately adding white ashes. Good-quality peat salt from the Lowlands was highly valued for herring but was expensive and produced only in small quantities.

By the mid–thirteenth century, good-quality zelle was becoming hard to find and very valuable, which made peat salt even more expensive. The greedy would pilfer dikes, the earthworks that kept out the sea, for peat. The one sacrosanct law of Dutch society, a nation living at sea level and below, is to preserve the dikes. Salt makers began to be seen as a threat to this critical first line of national defense, and laws were passed heavily taxing zelle, then fining anyone who dug peat within the Zeeland dikes, and, in time, repressing the salt industry.

Salt making from Olaus Magnus’s 1555
A Description of the Northern Peoples. Kungliga Biblioteket

Some sea salt was produced on the southern shore of England, but only in unusually dry, sunny summers. On the Danish island of Laesø, in the body of water known as the Kattegat, which lies between Denmark and Sweden, sea salt was produced by evaporating ocean water to a denser brine and then boiling it. The Finnish, too, made salt by this process, boiling down arctic seawater near the current Russian town of Murmansk. The salt was mostly used for the productive salmon fishery of the area, but some of it was shipped by cart to Finland and Russia. The Norwegians used a similar process. Though this salt was expensive, the demand made it economically feasible. Oslo was actually a salt trading center.

Olaus Magnus described how Norwegians improved upon this arduous sea salt process by pumping saltier water from sea depths by means of piping made from hollowed tree trunks. The same practice was carried out in Sweden until the eighteenth century. The process destroyed a great deal of forest, the source of fuel and piping, to produce only a small amount of salt.