Salt (9 page)

Ramsauer’s dig and the Dürnberg finds showed a society living off of salt mining, secluded on remote and rugged mountains at an altitude of 3,000 feet, and yet trading to the far ends of the continent. These people were buried with valuable possessions from the Mediterranean, from North Africa, even from the Near East. Ramsauer’s investigation of these salt miners began to challenge the perception of northern Europe’s Iron Age barbarians.

O
NLY IN THE
1990s did Westerners become aware of the mummies that had been found in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. They had been discovered in and near the Tarim Basin, west of Tibet, east of Samarkand and Tashkent, between China and central Asia along the Silk Road, the principal trade route between the Mediterranean and Beijing. It was the road of Marco Polo, but these people had lived more than three millennia earlier, about 2000
B.C.
As with the early Egyptian burials that are 1,000 years older, the corpses had been preserved by the naturally salty soil.

The condition of the bodies and their bright colored clothing was spectacular. The men wore leggings striped in blue, ochre, and crimson. They appeared to be tall with blond or light brown hair, sometimes red beards, and the women’s hair woven in long blond braids. These unknown people were in appearance notably similar to the large blue-eyed blond Celtic warriors described by the Romans almost two millennia later. Their conical felt hats and twill jackets bore a close resemblance to those of the salt miners in Hallein and Hallstatt—not unlike the much later plaids of the Scottish Highlands. The red-and-blue pinstripes were almost identical to fabrics found in the Dürnberg mine. Textile historian Elizabeth Wayland Barber concluded that even the weave was nearly identical workmanship. Why Celts might have been in the salty desert of Asia many centuries before there were known to be Celts remains a mystery.

In the centuries when the Celtic culture was documented, beginning 1,300 years after these seemingly Celtic bodies were buried in Asian salt, they did trade and travel great distances, usually selling salt from their rich central European mines. Like the Egyptians, they learned that it was not as profitable to trade and transport salt as salted foods.

According to the Greeks and Romans, who not only wrote about Celts but traded Mediterranean products for their salt and salt products, Celts ate a great deal of meat, both wild and domesticated. Salted meat was a Celtic specialty.

When the Romans finally succeeded in imposing their culture on the Celts, Moccus, which means “pig,” was the Celtic name for the god Mercury. The Celts did not mean it unkindly. To the pig-loving Celts, the leg of wild boar was considered the choicest piece of meat and was reserved for warriors. With domesticated pigs also, according to Strabo, the first-century-
B.C.
Greek historian, the Celts preferred the legs. It is likely that among the Celtic contributions to Western culture are the first salt-cured hams.

Athenaeus, a first-century-
A.D.
Greek living in Rome, wrote that the Celts most valued the upper part of the ham, which was reserved for the bravest warrior. If two warriors claimed rights to this cut, the dispute would be settled by combat. Fighting over the ham may be more the Greco-Roman view of Celts than the reality. But the Celts certainly made, traded, and ate hams.

Among the few remaining Celtic cultures, this tradition of savoring a salt-cured leg from the hunt endures. An example is Scottish salted haunch of venison.

Take the venison to be salted after it has hung in the larder for two days. Cut it into pieces the required size. See that it is clean and free from fly,
but on no account wash it with water
[her italics]. Take 2 pounds kitchen salt, one quarter pound demerara sugar, 1 teaspoon black pepper, one half teaspoon nitre [natron]. Mix these well together. Rub pieces of venison on every side with this mixture for 2–3 days in succession. Then place them in a wooden tub, or earthenware jar, and press them well together. After 10 days the venison is ready for use. Venison treated in this way, if pressed into a jar and the air excluded, should keep for months, and a haunch which has been well salted in this manner for about three weeks can be hung up to dry as a ham.—
Margaret Fraser,
A Highland Cookery Book,
1930

According to Annette Hope, an Edinburgh librarian who collected Scottish recipes, Margaret Fraser came from a family of gamekeepers on a Highland estate, and most of her recipes were for venison, though the same ideas may have been used for legs of other game and domestic meat. The sugar—she specified the light brown of Demerara, British Guiana—would not have been used by original Celts, but the natron may have been.

T
HE EARLY CELTIC
salt miners understood their mountains. They realized that horizontal shafts from the mountainside, though a great deal easier to travel and move rock through, would require far more digging to reach the rich salt deposits. Instead they dug at steep angles and skillfully shored up the shafts. The miners had to climb out, flaming torch clenched in their teeth, leather back sack loaded with rock, at forty-five- or fifty-degree angles. Though the master ironworkers of their age, they made their picks and other metal tools out of bronze, the antiquated metal of a more primitive era. They seem to have learned that bronze would not be corroded by salt the way iron is.

The Celts, or their central European ancestors known as the Urnfield people, because they cremated their dead and buried them in urns, had many innovations besides those in salt mining. They developed the first organized agriculture in northern Europe, experimenting with such revolutionary ideas as fertilizer and crop rotation. They introduced wheat to northern Spain. They were sophisticated bronze casters, skilled iron miners and forgers. They introduced to much of western Europe iron and their many iron inventions, including chain armor and the feared Celtic sword, which was three feet long. But they also invented the seamless iron rim for wagon wheels, the barrel, and possibly the horseshoe. They may have been the first Europeans to ride horses.

One thing the Celts were not advanced in was statecraft. Ironically, the closest the Celts ever came to fusing into a nation was in the first century when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. A Celtic leader named Vercingetorix, which means “warrior king,” gathered warriors from the diverse Celtic groups to face the Romans at Alesia, now Alise-Sainte Reine on the lower Seine. Vercingetorix’s father had attempted the same thing unsuccessfully in 80
B.C.

According to Caesar, while besieged Celts were so desperate that they were debating whether to eat the elderly noncombatants, forty-one Celtic tribes responded to Vercingetorix’s call by sending a relief column to Alesia of 8,000 horsemen and 250,000 foot soldiers.

Some historians believe that had the Celts won at Alesia, it would have been the beginning of a united Celtic nation. But the Romans won and subjugated the Celts and wrote their history.

Despite the fame of their bright clothing, Celts are described going naked into battle except for horned helmets. We are told that they had frightening war cries and that the terrifying songs of their ancesters were preludes to violent attacks. They fought, the Romans said, with a furor. And they swooped off heads with their large iron swords and hung these trophies on their houses or strung them along the horse bridle. Vercingetorix was apparently a ruthless leader, a fanatic obsessed with freeing his people from the Romans, willing to destroy entire towns and ruthlessly level opponents to achieve his goal.

Gold stater of the Avernes tribe with the face of Apollo and the inscription “Vercingetorixs.”
The Granger Collection

But he was trying to stand up to the Roman legions of Julius Caesar. The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people.

After the Roman campaigns were over, all that remained of Celtic life were isolated groups on the far Atlantic coasts: northwestern Iberia, the Brittany peninsula, the Cornish tip of England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. All of these groups were treated by the chroniclers of later nation-states as recalcitrant people interfering with the building of great states—Britain, France, or Spain.

The Roman victory had been total. Celtic inventions—in salt mining, iron, agriculture, trade, horsemanship—enriched the Roman Empire. Celtic salt mines became part of Roman wealth, and Celtic hams became part of the Roman diet with few ever remembering that such things were once Celtic. The Celts were innovators. The Romans were nation builders.

CHAPTER FOUR

Salt’s Salad Days

T
HE ROMANS PAID
homage to democracy, the rights of the common citizen and, for a time, republicanism. But they rarely lived up to any of these ideals. Roman history is the chronic struggle between the privileged patricians and the disenfranchised plebeians. Plebeians fought to have a voice, and patricians endeavored to keep them excluded. The Roman patrician often tried to keep his privileges by offering lesser rights to plebeians. In this spirit, patricians insisted that every man had a right to salt. “Common salt,” as it has come to be known, was a Roman concept.

Patricians ate an elaborate cuisine that expressed opulence in ingredients and presentation. Roman cooks seemed to avoid leaving anything in its natural state. They loved the esoteric, such as sow’s vulva and teats, a dish that is frequently mentioned for banquets and which provoked a debate as to whether it should be from a virgin sow or, as Pliny the Elder suggested, one whose first litter was aborted.