Salt (6 page)

On the one side were Confucians, inspired by Mencius, who, when asked how a state should raise profits, replied, “Why must Your Majesty use the word
profit
? All I am concerned with are the good and the right. If Your Majesty says, ‘How can I profit my state?’ your officials will say, ‘How can I profit my family?’ and officers and common people will say, ‘How can I profit myself?’ Once superiors and inferiors are competing for profit, the state will be in danger.”

On the other side were government ministers and thinkers influenced by the legalist Han Feizi, who had died in 233
B.C.
Han Feizi, who had been a student of one of the most famous Confucian teachers, had not believed that it was practical to base government on morality. He believed it should be based on the exercise of power and a legal code that meted out harsh punishment to transgressors. Both rewards and punishments should be automatic and without arbitrary interpretation. He believed laws should be decreed in the interest of the state, that people should be controlled by fear of punishment. If his way was followed, “the State will get rich and the army will be strong,” he claimed. “Then it will be possible to succeed in establishing hegemony over other states.”

In the salt and iron debate, legalists argued: “It is difficult to see, in these conditions, how we could prevent the soldiers who defend the Great Wall from dying of cold and hunger. Suppress the state monopolies and you deliver a fatal blow to the nation.”

But to this came the Confucian response, “The true conqueror does not have to make war; the great general does not need to put troops in the field nor have a clever battle plan. The sovereign who reigns by bounty does not have an enemy under heaven. Why do we need military spending?”

To which came the response, “The perverse and impudent Hun has been allowed to cross our border and carry war into the heart of the country, massacring our population and our officers, not respecting any authority. For a long time he has deserved an exemplary punishment.”

It was argued that the borders had become permanent military camps that caused suffering to the people on the interior. “Even if the monopolies on salt and iron represented, at the outset, a useful measure, in the long term they can’t help but be damaging.”

Even the need for state revenues was debated. One participant quoted Laozi, a contemporary of Confucius and founder of Daoism, “A country is never as poor as when it seems filled with riches.”

The debate was considered a draw. But Emperor Zhaodi, who ruled for fourteen years but only lived to age twenty-two, continued the monopolies, as did his successor. In 44
B.C.
, the next emperor, Yuandi, abolished them. Three years later, with the treasury emptied by a third successful western expedition to Sogdiana in Turkistan, he reestablished the monopolies. They continued to be abolished and reestablished regularly according to budgetary needs, usually related to military activities. Toward the end of the first century
A.D.
, a Confucian government minister had them once more abolished, declaring, “Government sale of salt means competing with subjects for profit. These are not measures fit for wise rulers.”

The state salt monopoly disappeared for 600 years. But it was resurrected. During the Tang dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 907, half the revenue of the Chinese state was derived from salt. Aristocrats showed off their salt wealth by the unusual extravagance of serving pure salt at the dinner table, something rarely done in China, and placing it in a lavish, ornate saltcellar.

Over the centuries, many popular uprisings bitterly protested the salt monopoly, including an angry mob that took over the city of Xi’an, just north of Sichuan, in 880. And the other great moral and political questions of the great debate on salt and iron—the need for profits, the rights and obligations of nobility, aid to the poor, the importance of a balanced budget, the appropriate tax burden, the risk of anarchy, and the dividing line between rule of law and tyranny—have all remained unresolved issues.

CHAPTER TWO

Fish, Fowl, and Pharaohs

O
N THE EASTERN
end of North Africa’s almost unimaginably vast desert, the Nile River provides a fertile green passage only a few miles wide down both banks. Egyptian civilization has always been crammed into this narrow strip, surrounded by a crawling wind-swept desert, like a lapping sea, that threatens to wash it away. Even today in modern high-rise Cairo, the sweepers come out in the morning to chase away the sand from the devouring desert.

The earliest Egyptian burial sites have been found where the desert begins at the edge of the green strip on either side. They date from about 3000
B.C.
, the same time as the earliest record of salt making in Sichuan, but before the era of the great Egyptian states and even before such marks of Egyptian civilization as hieroglyphics. The cadavers at these early burial sites still have flesh and skin. They are not mummies and yet are surprisingly well preserved for 5,000-year-old corpses. The dry, salty desert sand protected them, and this natural desert phenomenon held the rudiments of an idea about preserving flesh.

To the Egyptians, a dead body was the vessel connecting earthly life to the afterlife. Eternal life could be maintained by a sculpted image of the person or even by the repetition of the deceased’s name, but the ideal circumstance was to have the body permanently preserved. At all stages of ancient Egyptian civilization a tomb had two parts: one, below ground, for housing the corpse, and a second area above for offerings. In simpler burial places, the upper part might be just the open area above ground.

The upper level makes clear the importance the ancient Egyptians attached to the preparation and eating of food. Elaborate funereal feasts were held in these spaces, and copious quantities of food were left as offerings. The feasts, and sometimes the preparation of foods, were depicted on the walls. Every important period in ancient Egyptian history produced tombs containing detailed information about food. Though the intention was to leave this for the benefit of the deceased, it has given posterity a clear view of an elaborate and inventive ancient cuisine.

The poorest may have had little to eat but unraised bread, beer, and onions. The Egyptians credited onions and garlic with great medicinal qualities, believing that onion layers resembled the concentric circles of the universe. Onions were placed in the mummified cadavers of the dead, sometimes serving in place of the eyes. Herodotus, the Greek historian born about 490
B.C.
and considered the founder of the modern discipline of history, described the tomb of the pyramid of Giza, built about 2900
B.C.
He wrote that an inscription on one wall asserted that during twenty years of construction, the builders supplied the workers with radishes, onions, and garlic worth 1,600 talents of silver, which in contemporary dollars would be about $2 million.

But the upper classes had a richly varied diet, perhaps the most evolved cuisine of their time. Remains of food found in a tomb from before 2000
B.C.
include quail, stewed pigeon, fish, ribs of beef, kidneys, barley porridge, wheat bread, stewed figs, berries, cheese, wine, and beer. Other funereal offerings found in tombs included salted fish and a wooden container holding table salt.

The Egyptians mixed brine with vinegar and used it as a sauce known as
oxalme
, which was later used by the Romans. Like the Sichuan Chinese, the Egyptians had an appreciation for vegetables preserved in brine or salt. “There is no better food than salted vegetables” are words written on an ancient papyrus. Also, they made a condiment from preserved fish or fish entrails in brine, perhaps similar to the Chinese forerunner of soy sauce.

The ancient Egyptians may have been the first to cure meat and fish with salt. The earliest Chinese record of preserving fish in salt dates from around 2000
B.C.
Salted fish and birds have been found in Egyptian tombs from considerably earlier. Curing flesh in salt absorbs the moisture in which bacteria grows. Furthermore, the salt itself kills bacteria. Some of the impurities found in ancient sodium chloride were other salts such as saltpeter, which are even more aggressive bacteria slayers. Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.

Whether the Egyptians discovered this process first or not, they were certainly the first civilization to preserve food on a large scale. Those narrow fertile strips on either bank of the Nile were their principal source of food, and a dry year in which the Nile failed to flood could be disastrous. To be prepared, Egyptians put up food in every way they could, including stockpiling grain in huge silos. This fixation on preserving a food supply led to considerable knowledge of curing and fermentation.

Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs. They tried to domesticate for meat the hyenas that scavenged the edge of villages looking for scraps and dead animals to eat, but most Egyptians were revolted by the idea of eating such an animal. Other failed Egyptian attempts at animal husbandry include antelope, gazelle, oryx, and ibex. In the northern Sinai and what is now the southern Israeli Negev Desert, the remnants of pens for such fauna, the remains of these failed experiments, have been found. But the Egyptians did succeed in domesticating fowl—ducks, geese, quail, pigeon, and pelican. Ancient walls show fowl being splayed, salted, and put into large earthen jars.

A great source of Egyptian food was the wetlands of the Nile, the reedy marshes where fowl could be found, as well as fish such as carp, eel, mullet, perch, and tigerfish. The Egyptians salted much of this fish. They also dried, salted, and pressed the eggs of mullet, creating another of the great Mediterranean foods known in Italian as
bottarga
.

The Egyptians lay claim to another pivotal food invention: making the fruit of the olive tree edible. Almost every Mediterranean culture claims olives as its discovery. The Egyptians of 4000
B.C.
believed that the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, taught them how to grow olives. The Greeks have a similar legend. But the Hebrew word for olive,
zait
, is probably older than the Greek word,
elaia,
and is thought to refer to Said in the Nile Delta. It may have been Syrians or Cretans who first bred the
Olea europaea
from the pathetic, scraggly, wild oleaster tree. The Egyptians were not great olive oil producers and imported most of their olive oil from the Middle East. The fresh-picked fruit of the olive tree is so hard and bitter, so unappealing, that it is a wonder anyone experimented long enough to find a way to make it edible. But the Egyptians learned very early that the bitter glucides unique to this fruit, now known as oleuropeina, could be removed from the fruit by soaking in water, and the fruit could be softened in brine. The salt would render it not only edible but enjoyable.

Making olives and making olive oil are at cross purposes, since a good eating olive is low in oil content. It may be that this was characteristic of Egyptian olives. These eating olives were included in the food caches of ancient Egyptian tombs.

The Egyptians were the inventors of raised bread. To make leavened bread, a gluten-producing grain, not barley or millet, was necessary, and about 3000
B.C.
the Egyptians developed wheat that could be ground and stretched into a dough capable of entrapping carbon dioxide from yeast. The starting yeast was often leftover fermented dough, sour dough, which is another example of lactic acid fermentation. Egyptian bakers created an enormous variety of breads in different shapes, sometimes with the addition of honey or milk or eggs. Most of these doughs, as with modern breads, were made from a base of flour, water, and a pinch of salt.

In 1250
B.C.
, when Moses liberated the Hebrew slaves, leading them out of Egypt across the Sinai, the Hebrews took with them only flat unleavened bread,
matzo,
which is described by the Hebrew phrase
lechem oni,
meaning “bread of the poor.” Poor Egyptians did not have the sumptuous assortment of Egyptian raised bread but, like people outside of Egypt, ate flat bread known as
ta,
which sometimes had coarse grain, even chaff, in it and lacked the luxury of “a pinch of salt.” According to Jewish legend, the fleeing Hebrews took unleavened bread because they lacked time to let the bread rise. But it may also have been what they were used to making, or perhaps it was a conscious rejection of Egyptian culture and the luxuries of the slave owners. Raised bread and salt curing were emblematic of the high-living Egyptians.