Salt (60 page)

Some sauces are darker, some lighter, some thicker, some thinner. The best Lezhi sauce is not quite as thick as its number two product, but it is black, caramelly, and complex. Differences in sauces are determined by the length of fermentation and the amount of water added at the end.

In Lezhi, soy sauce is still sold the old-fashioned way: Customers bring their own bottles, and the sauce is ladled out of crocks. But it is also marketed under the label Wo Bo, which is the name of a local bridge. A room in the dank little factory has a shiny new machine, the only shiny new thing in the plant. The handful of people that is the company, some in suit and tie, others in workers’ clothes, all entrepreneurs of the new China, look on with excitement as this machine seals soy sauce into plastic bags to be sold out of town.

C
HINA IS CHANGING
quickly. The gray and red courtyard buildings of Beijing, some 500 years old, are being torn down at a pitiless rate. In the glare of neon lights that now explode in the sky every night on top of the capital’s new high-rise buildings, are Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s advertisements. Fried chicken has been easier to sell than hamburgers, because the Chinese have been eating fried chicken for centuries.

Guo Zhenzhong, a sixty-three-year-old professor who lives in a small apartment stacked floor-to-ceiling with books in a ten-year-old apartment block that already looks eighty years old, does not fit perfectly into this new China. He dresses simply, studies his books, takes great pleasure in traveling to international academic conferences, and appears not to have heard the news that China has switched to a market economy. He cares little for the new consumerist China with its Western labels, both real and fraudulent. Like most Chinese, he still eats the old foods. He once went to a McDonald’s. What did he think of it?

He shook his head disapprovingly and said, “No vegetables.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

More Salt than Fish

T
HE IDEA THAT
salt enhances the taste of sugar has not entirely vanished from the West. It is a guiding concept of the snack food industry. A clear example of this is honey-roasted peanuts, but in fact salt and sugar are ingredients in most industrial snack food.

Before refrigeration, when butter was preserved with considerable quantities of salt, sugar was thought to counteract and even mask the saltiness.

Since tasting is all that is needed to detect oversalting, some merchants try to mask this taste by adding a little sugar. So in tasting salted butter, if you detect a sweet or sugary taste, don’t buy it.—
Francis Marre:
Défendez votre estomac contre les fraudes alimentaires
Protect your stomach against food fraud, Paris, 1911

Curiously, the concept of sugar counteracting salt still flourishes in Sweden, a country which imports both its salt and its sugar, and perhaps for that reason gives them equal regard. The first record of sugar in Sweden is from 1324, when, for a funeral of the wealthiest man in the country, 1.5 kilo sugar, 1.5 kilo pepper, .5 kilo saffron—all exotic luxuries—were imported.

According to Carl Jan Granqvist, a well-known Swedish restaurateur and food commentator, “Sugar brings out the saltiness of salt.” Cakes are made with salt. Breads are made with sugar. In September, when crayfish are in season in Sweden, they are served with salt, sugar, and dill. Sugar and salt is a leitmotif of Swedish cooking. There is even a Swedish word for it,
socker-saltad
, sugar salting, which is also the first ingredient listed on many labels.

For newcomers to Scandinavia, one of the more infamous uses of sockersaltad is
salt lakrits
, salted licorice candy, which sometimes comes in the shape of herring, sometimes in laces, or in a gumdrop shape, called a salt bomber, with salt sprinkled on top. A salt lakrits–coated vanilla ice cream, sold on a stick, is a
lakrits puck,
though the manufacturer, GB Glace, said it was made with ammonium chloride, not sodium chloride, which does not seem at all reassuring. Swedes often mention salt lakrits as the one thing they miss when they go abroad. Other Scandinavians and the Dutch are afflicted with the same craving.

Also high on the list of foods missed by Swedes abroad is
kaviar
, a name which purists would see as a travesty, since it contains no sturgeon eggs. Kaviar is salted cod roe mashed with potatoes and sold in a squeezable metal tube. The first ingredient listed on the tube is sockersaltad.

The leading use of sockersaltad, and probably the one that has kept the taste in the northern palate, is for curing fish. On the west coast of Sweden, herring is ground with onions and made into fritters, which are served with a sweet currant sauce. One of the most celebrated expressions of this Swedish taste is gravlax, literally buried salmon. Originally, gravlax was salmon that was cured by being buried in the ground for days or months, an old Scandinavian technique used for preserving herring as well. The longer it is buried, the longer it will keep. But, paradoxically, the longer it has been buried, the more it resembles in smell and texture something rotten. Older Icelanders still horrify youth with smelly little chunks of
hákarl
, buried Greenland shark. Burying produces a very smelly fish rejected by most of the public. The Swedes have maintained the popularity of gravlax by replacing it with salmon cured with salt and sugar.

H
ERRING STILL COMES
and goes in the Baltic and the North Sea in ways no one can predict. The sea between Norway, Denmark, and Sweden is called the Skagerrak. Klädesholmen, a flat rocky island only yards off the Swedish coastline in the Skagerrak, has had only six good herring runs recorded in all of history. The first was in the sixteenth century. Then the herring went away and did not return until 1780. From 1780 to 1808, Klädesholmen was awash with herring. The villagers boiled herring in water, and the oil that rose to the surface lit the street-lamps of Paris and London.

In those years, while herring seemed to be vanishing from the Norwegian coastline, the large population on the tiny island of Klädesholmen were fishing and processing herring, as well as cod and ling. The two boiling plants, owned by wealthy Göteborg and Stockholm merchants, made oil twenty-four hours a day. Then, in the early nineteenth century, fewer herring showed up each September. Some blamed this on the foul smell of the island with its herring oil plants dumping stinking waste back into the sea. Klädesholmen smelled so bad, it was said, that even the herring couldn’t stand it. There was not another good run until 1880 to 1900, and there were none in the twentieth century.

More than 1,000 people lived on the island in the eighteenth century. By the twenty-first century, the island had only 470 inhabitants. In the early twentieth century, hundreds of women had been employed cutting up herring for canning, wearing aprons made from Cuban sugar sacks waterproofed with linseed oil. Men mixed salt for the herring with Cuban sugar, then added sandalwood, ginger, cloves, mace, coriander, cinnamon, allspice, oregano, dill, and bay leaf.

In the 1980s, there were 200 herring workers. Today, more herring is produced with fewer than 100 people working for eight herring canneries, all of them family-owned businesses. For the small companies on Klädesholmen, it is more economic to buy barrels of fish from one of two companies that now process herring for all of Sweden. They buy herring and cure it in a brine in which, for every thirteen kilos of salt, nine kilos of sugar are added.

Women preparing herring for canning in Klädesholmen in the 1920s.
Klädesholmens Museum

At the big herring plants, decisions about these formulas are still made by the brine mixer, who, like the master salters on the old-time cod vessels, has the highest salary.

But life has changed in all of Sweden. Until a lumber boom in the mid–nineteenth century it was one of Europe’s poorest countries. Before the 1960s and 1970s, the only refrigeration in a Swedish kitchen was cabinets with holes to the outdoors in the wall. Historically, salted provisions got Sweden through its long winters, and traditional Scandinavian food is very salty. A Swedish sausage is coated in a white layer of salt. In Sweden, Äppelfläsk used to be made in the fall when the apples came in. They were sliced and sauteed in salt pork and sugar syrup. But today, everywhere in Scandinavia, as in much of the rest of northern Europe and North America, people are eating less salt and less salted foods. Few eat Äppelfläsk anymore.

Some of the disappearing uses of salt seem so strange it is difficult to understand why they were ever popular.
Snus
is tobacco and salt. It was molded into a wad with the fingers, jammed up between the cheek and gum, and sucked on for an entire day; fresheners were added every hour or so. Some even put it in before going to bed and woke up at night for a fresh wad. And even the Swedes wonder at the habit of the Laplander in the far north, drinking salted coffee.