Salt (24 page)

The ancient cheese was and still is produced from milk of the sheep that graze on the rugged slopes of a hidden mountain area named after its largest town, the village of St.-Affrique. Although St.-Affrique has a humid climate, its soil cannot produce crops because the porous limestone rock absorbs most of the moisture.

The farmers would collect the milk, curdle it with rennet, then scoop the curds by hand into molds. A powder made from grating moldy bread was sprinkled into the curds. At least since the seventeenth century, the mold came from a huge round bread, half wheat and half rye. Probably other breads were used earlier. The bread was stored in the same damp caves that aged the cheese, and in a few weeks it turned blue and was ground to dust for cheese making. The crumbs fermented in the cheese, creating bubbles, which after weeks also started to turn blue.

In 1411, the French Crown granted a patent declaring that only the cheese of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon could be called Roquefort cheese. Roquefort-sur-Soulzon was a tiny village with a few families, located by a rock mass called the Combalou Plateau. In the caves that run under the village, heat and humidity from underground springs are trapped in the rocks. But air constantly circulates from faults in the rock, creating air shaft-like tunnels called
fleurines
. The cheese cellars were built 100 feet into the rock in natural caves moistened by the springs and aired by the fleurines.

The environment of the cellar is cool, extremely humid, and moldy. The temperature is constant, about forty-five degrees Fahrenheit day and night all year. The rock walls, the old hand-hewn wooden beams, the wooden shelving where the cheeses are aged—all are continually slippery wet from the moisture. The rocks offer a kaleidoscope of mold and lichen patterns, and it has been discovered in modern times that this growth is essential to developing the flavor of the cheese.

Again, there is the legend of a founding accident: An absentminded shepherd boy left his lunch of cheese curd and rye bread in a cave and weeks later discovered Roquefort cheese. Even if the legend is apocryphal, it offers a fair description of how the cheese is made. But for the cheese to be of commercial value, it needs to last for some time. The salt of Aigues-Mortes is rubbed on the top of the cheeses at the outset of aging. Twenty-four hours later, the cheese is turned and the process repeated. The salt melts and begins to work into the cheese. Like the cheese of Parma, Roquefort becomes overly salty, and this unfairly gives the cheese a reputation for saltiness. Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, the eighteenth-century Frenchman said to be the first food journalist, claimed that cheese was a salty snack for drinking. “For those who need to provoke thirst Roquefort cheese deserves more than any other the epithet of the drunkard’s biscuit.”

T
HE BASQUES LEARNED
how to make hams in their long war with the Celts and then learned to market them in their long peace with the ham-loving Romans.
Jambon de Bayonne
, Bayonne ham, was never made in Bayonne but was shipped from the Basque port of Bayonne at the mouth of the Adour River. It has never been clear, however, if the ham is Basque, though the Basques surprise no one by insisting that it is. Modern France has defined the famous jambon de Bayonne, which was first written about in the sixth century, as a product made in the watershed of the Adour, an area including all of French Basque-land and bits of the neighboring regions of Landes, Béarn, and Bigorre.

One thing is clear. The salt with which it is made is not Basque. It is from Béarn, from a village a few miles from Basque country called Salies-de-Béarn, Béarn saltworks. According to medieval legend, a hunter wounded a wild boar and chased it into the marsh. By the time he found the animal lying in water, it was already preserved in salt. The brine springs of Lüneburg near Hamburg have an almost identical legend, and an ancient ham, supposedly made from the porcine discoverer, is on display in the Lüneburg town hall.

Throughout the watershed of the Adour, shards of pots used in salt making have been found, and some have been dated as early as 1500
B.C.
Broken Roman pots have been found within walking distance of Salies-de-Béarn.

Whether or not a wounded boar ever fell in that spot in the center of Salies-de Béarn, the village has since salted millions of pigs. The town grew up around the mouth of a natural brine spring where a large basin was built to catch the escaping brine. The basin was edged in steps to facilitate approaching it with buckets. The earliest mention of this pool is in the twelfth century, and every narrow, winding street in Salies leads to it.

A town official would test the brine concentration by placing an egg in the pool. When the egg floated, salt making could begin. One or two distributions were possible each week. Some would go to the brine basin themselves with a bucket in hand, but most families hired
tiradous
to gather the brine. The large wooden buckets they used,
sameaux,
were an official unit of measure, each holding ninety-two liters (twenty-four gallons) of saltwater. In every distribution, each house was entitled to twenty-six sameaux.

At the toll of the bell, the tiradous would run down the steps into the brine, which they scooped into their sameaux, and run back to their houses with this weighty, twenty-four-gallon load. They each repeated this twenty-six times, as quickly as possible because they were competing with the other families, and the most concentrated brine from the bottom of the basin would be scooped up by the swiftest tiradous. Weaker brine took longer to evaporate, required more firewood, and so was less profitable.

In front of each house was a stone well into which the tiradous would quickly but carefully pour the brine and then run back for more. A canal of hollowed oak trunks ran under the house to the basement salt-making shop where the brine would be boiled.

The families eligible to participate in this community resource were called
part-prenants.
A part-prenant had to be a descendant of one of the original families, though no one knows exactly when these families originated or how many there were. A code was first written in the Béarnaise language on November 11, 1587, when the tradition was already many centuries old. This code defined the group and stated that descendants had part-prenant rights only if they resided within the ramparts of town. If a woman married “a foreigner”—someone from out of town—her children would only be entitled to a half portion, thirteen sameaux, and their future descendants would receive nothing. But a man could marry an out-of-towner, and he and his heirs would receive full portions. In the fourteenth century, there were 200 part-prenant families, but by the time of the French Revolution, Salies-de-Béarn had 800 part-prenant families.

O
N THE MEDITERRANEAN
coast, west of Aigues-Mortes, in Catalan country near the Spanish border, was the fishing village of Collioure. The people of Collioure lived on selling wine and salted fish. They fished anchovies from May to October on small wooden boats that could sail over the rocks of the shallow harbor, powered by a lateen sail, a triangle of canvas gracefully draped from the mast on a cross spar at a sixty-degree angle. The design dated back to the Phoenicians, but in Collioure they called their fishing boats
catalans
and painted them in brilliant primary colors.

In October, as the anchovy season ended, the wine harvest began on the terraced hills above the town. The wine, called Banyuls, has a dark spicy sweetness that is a perfect counterbalance to the salted anchovies. The people of Collioure worked their patch of vineyard, cutting back the vines, preparing for the next year until the leaves and the shoots came, and then it was May, time to let the grapes grow and fish anchovies. Each family had a catalan for fishing and a patch on the hill for growing grapes. The men went to sea, and the women mended the nets and sold the catch in town.

Most of the catch was put up in salt. Originally, the anchovy salters used local sea salt from Laplame, one of several sea salt operations in the natural ponds along the Catalan coast. But in time the saltworks at the mouth of the Rhône dominated.

In the fourteenth century, an epidemic of bubonic plague, whose delirious victims die within days in excruciating pain, swept through the continent, killing 75 million people—as much as half the population of Europe, according to some estimates. But the fishing village of Collioure was not touched, and it was widely believed that the town was immune because of the presence of huge stockpiles of salt for the anchovies.

Since the time of ancient Greece, anchovies have been the most praised salted fish in the Mediterranean, and since the Middle Ages those of Collioure have been regarded as the best salted anchovies in the world. They are smaller, leaner, more flavorful than their Atlantic cousins. In the Middle Ages, Collioure was also famous for its salted tuna and sardines. The salters were men because their strength was needed to heft the salt. Anchovy filleting was done by women because it required small fingers to rip the tiny fillets off the bones. Freshly caught anchovies were mixed in sea salt and kept for a month. Then the heads were removed and the fish cleaned with no tool other than the swift nimble fingers of the women, who then carefully arranged the fish in barrels with alternating layers of fish and salt. There they remained with a heavy weight on top for about three months. The length of time depended on the size of the fish and the weather, especially the temperature. When the anchovies were ripe, the color of the meat around the bones was a deep pink, almost wine colored, and the brine, produced by the salt melting in the juice it extracted from the fish, turned pink. Unscrupulous anchovy makers dyed their brine pink.

ANCHOVIES:
These delicate fish are preserved in barrels with bay salt, and no other of the finny tribe has so fine a flavor. Choose those which look red and mellow, and the bones must be oily. They should be high flavored, and have a fine smell; but beware of their being mixed with red paint to improve their color and appearance.—
Mary Eaton,
The Cook and Housekeepers Complete and Universal Dictionary,
Bungay, England, 1822

The French Crown attached such importance to the commercial potential of Collioure salted fish that the town was exempted from any salt tax. This greatly aided the local anchovy business, but it was the sort of arbitrary exception that was to make the French salt tax a political disaster.

CHAPTER TEN