Salt (21 page)

Sweden hoped to acquire an island in the Caribbean from which to produce salt, but when it finally got one, St.-Barthélemy, the amount of salt produced and shipped back to Sweden was barely enough to cure the quantity of herring destined for the island as slave food.

The shortage of salt in the North was frustrating because of all the world’s oceans, the cold subarctic seas have the densest schools and the greatest variety of species. Magnus wrote:

Herring can be purchased very cheaply for the supply is copious. They present themselves in such large numbers off shore that they not only burst the fishermen’s nets, but, when they arrive in their shoals, an axe or halberd thrust into their midst sticks firmly upright.—
Olaus Magnus,
A Description of the Northern Peoples,
1555

Landing herring from Olaus Magnus’s 1555
A Description of the Northern Peoples. Kungliga Biblioteket

The abundance of herring, combined with their method of extracting food from swallowing seawater and the fact that they appeared to die instantly when taken from the water, led some medieval observers of natural phenomena to conclude that herring was a unique species of fish whose only nourishment was the seawater itself. Adding to their mystique, herring seem to let out a cry when they die, a high-pitched hiss, which is probably air escaping the swimming bladder.

The small fish were also noted by maritime people for a phenomenon known as herring lightning, which occurred because the shoals were so dense that they reflected light.

In the sea at night its eyes shine like lamps, and, what is more, when these fish are moving rapidly and the huge shoal turns back on itself, they resemble flashes of lightning in the churning water.—
Olaus Magnus,
A Description of the Northern Peoples,
1555

A
NUMBER OF
ways were found to preserve herring with small quantities of salt. The Dutch had their
groene haringen,
green herring, sometimes called new herring, which was gutted on board ship in early spring or late fall—before or after spawning. The herring were deboned, but the gall bladder had to be left in the fish because it contains enzymes that cure it. Then the fish were dunked in a mild brine. They had to be eaten soon, ideally within twenty-four hours, so while green herring required less salt, they had limited trading value.

For both meat and fish, smoking was a northern solution to a lack of salt. Salt is needed for smoking but in smaller quantities, because the smoking aids in conservation. The origin of smoking is unknown. The Romans smoked cheeses and ate Westphalian ham, which was smoked. It is not known when the first fish was smoked. In the 1960s, a Polish archaeologist found a fish smoking station in the area of Znin, which he dated from between the eighth and tenth centuries. The Celts and Germans did not lack salt, yet they smoked their hams because cold winters forced food to be enclosed in fire-warmed rooms.

Smoked foods almost always carry with them legends about their having been created by accident—usually the peasant hung the food too close to the fire, and then, imagine his surprise the next morning when . . .

Red herring, a famous export from the East Anglia region of England along the North Sea, is soaked in a brine of salt and saltpeter and then smoked over oak and turf. The discovery of red herring was described by a native East Anglian, Thomas Nash, in 1567. He claimed that it came about when a Yarmouth fisherman with an unusually large catch hung the surplus herring on a rafter, and by chance the room had a particularly smoky fire. Imagine his surprise the next day when the white-fleshed fish had turned “red as a lobster.”

Finnan haddie, a haddock soaked in brine and then smoked over peat and sawdust, was originally called Findon haddocks because it was made in the Scottish North Sea town of Findon, near Aberdeen. It was not commercialized until the mid–eighteenth century, though it may have been a household product for a long time before that. Despite the relatively recent date, it is commonly said that finnan haddie too was originally made accidentally by fishermen hanging their salt fish too close to the smoky peat fire in their cabin.

By the sixteenth century, if not earlier, on the Swedish coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, the body of water between Sweden and Finland, a light cure was devised for Baltic herring, and these pickled fish became known as
surströmming
. The Baltic Sea, a less salty body of water than the North Sea, has leaner and smaller herring than the Atlantic and North Sea herring eaten by the British and the Dutch. In Sweden, which has both a North Sea and a Baltic coast, the fish are known by completely different names. A Baltic herring is called a
strömming,
and a North Sea herring is a
sill
. A number of Baltic languages make this distinction. Russians speak of a Baltic
salaka
and an Atlantic
sel’d’.

A story persists in Sweden that surströmming was discovered by accident by Swedes trying to save on salt. Surströmming was a basic ration of the Swedish army in the seventeenth century during the fifty years of sporadic armed conflict that is known as the Thirty Years War. It is still regulated by a medieval royal ordinance and must be made from herring caught in April and May just before spawning. The head and entrails are removed, but the roe is kept in the herring, which is put into light brine in barrels holding 200 pounds of fish. The fish are left to ferment in the barrels for ten to twelve weeks at a temperature between fifty-four and sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit. The third Thursday in August, the producers are allowed to put the fish on the market.

Originally it was taken from the barrel, but in modern times it is canned in July. By eating time in September, the can is bulging on the top and bottom and looks ready to explode. As the can is opened, the family stands around it to get the first fumes. Nowadays some of the younger members flee the room. The can opener digs in, and a white milky brine fizzes out, bubbling like fermented cider and smelling like a blend of Parmesan cheese and the bilge water from an ancient fishing vessel.

These potent little fish have always been shrouded in controversy because, like Roman garum, they flirtatiously hover between fermented and rotten. Like garum, through, surströmming is in truth fermented and not rotten, because the brine the fish is dipped in is sufficient to prevent putrification until the fermentation process takes over. If done properly, surströmming has a strong flavor, one revered by aficionados of cured fish and loathed by the less initiated.

To eat surströmming, the bloated, bluish-white, little headless fish is slit in the belly and the roe removed. None but the brave eat the roe. The splayed fish is mashed hard on the spine with a fork and turned over. The bones can then be easily lifted off. The wine-colored fermented flesh inside is then placed on a buttered krisp, a Swedish cracker, with mashed potatoes. Swedes use a small long yellow fingerling potato with a floury texture—a breed designed to survive the northern winter. In the north of Sweden, onions are added, but in the south this is regarded as an unnecessary distraction. Once properly blended with all these tastes and textures, the fish is surprisingly pleasant. The only remaining problem is how to get the smell out of the house, a lingering odor that suggests the question: How could such a thing possibly have been eaten? In recent years a Swedish company tried to export surströmming to the United States, but the U.S. government refused it entry on the grounds that it was rotten.

T
HE MORE USUAL
way of preserving fish required a great deal of salt. Herring salting was described by Simon Smith, an agent for the British government, in 1641. As soon as the herring were taken from the nets, they were passed to “grippers,” who gutted them and mixed them with dry salt crystals and packed them in a barrel. The barrels were then left for a day to draw out the herring juice and dissolve most of the salt. Then more salt was added and the barrel closed. According to Smith, the brine had to be dense enough for the herring to float. A barrel containing 500 to 600 herring would require fifty-five pints of salt.

The salt shortage of the northern fisheries was solved by a commercial group that organized both herring and salt trades. Between 1250 and 1350, a grouping of small associations in northern German cities formed. Known as the Hanseatic League, from the Middle High German word
Hanse
, meaning “fellowship,” these associations pooled their resources to form more powerful groups to act in their commercial interests. They stopped piracy in the Baltic, initiated quality control on traded items, established commercial laws, provided reliable nautical charts, and built lighthouses and other aids to navigation.

Before the Hanseatics gained control of the northern herring trade, peat salt was often laced with ashes, and inferior, even rotten herring was commonly sold.
Le mèsnagier de Paris
gave this advice: “Good brine cured herring can be recognized because it is lean but with a thick back, round and green, whereas the bad ones are fat and yellow or the backs are flat and dry.”

The fine, round-backed ones would be nicely displayed on the top of the barrel, and then only a few layers down lay the flat, dry backs. The Hanseatics guaranteed that an entire barrel was of quality. Those caught placing bad herring in the bottom of a barrel were heavily fined and forced to return the payment they received. The inferior fish were burned and not thrown back into the sea for fear other fish would eat them and become tainted.

By the fourteenth century, the Hanseatics controlled the mouths of all the northerly flowing rivers of central Europe from the Rhine to the Vistula. They had organizations in Iceland, in London, and as far south as the Ukraine and even in Venice. This gave them the ability to buy salt from numerous sources to supply the northern countries. In the early fourteenth century, the Hanseatics, realizing the low prices and light tax on Portuguese salt more than made up for the cost of transporting it a longer distance, imported Setúbal white salt to trade in the Danish and Dutch fisheries. In the year 1452 alone, 200 Hanseatic ships stopped in Le Croisic to load Guérande salt for the Baltic.