Salt Read online

  The English passed laws against selling rancid butter. A 1396 law outlawed the use of salted yellow flowers. In 1662, a butter law was passed in England to establish standards. It allowed mixing rancid butter with good and specified that butter could only be salted with fine, not coarse-grained, salt, and it had to be packed with the producers’ first and last name clearly marked.

  To preserve butter fresh for long keeping.

  Make a brine as before described (salt enough to float an egg) and keep the butter sunk in it. About the beginning of May I caused this to be put into practice and potted up many lumps of butter bought fresh out of the market, and they all kept sweet, fresh.—John Collins, Salt and Fishery, Discourse Thereof, 1682

  The Church did not allow butter to be eaten on fast days because it came from cows. But it also earned enormous profits selling special dispensations to affluent people who could not bear going without butter for the forty days of Lent. Lent aside, butter was cheap food and was more popular with the poor than the rich. Because of the heavy salting, it was available most of the year. Beginning in the sixteenth century, it was even included in the rations of the Royal Navy.

  Determined to make butter more than a luxury for a rural elite, northern Europeans consistently tried to preserve it in salt. But getting good, properly preserved butter remained a problem until refrigeration was invented. In fact, the first experiments in refrigeration were not with fish or meat but with everyone’s favorite luxury—butter.

  Cheese, the more successful way to preserve milk and cream, was also a popular salted food of the poor, though only the wealthy sampled the full array of English cheeses—some 150 varieties (or at least this many were remaining in the 1970s when British cheese enthusiast Patrick Rance went on a crusade to save traditional English-cheese making).

  Cheshire, not surprisingly for a place with both dairy herds and saltworks, produced a great deal of cheese. Cheshire is the oldest known variety of English cheese and is thought to be more representative of a medieval English cheese than is cheddar or the blue-veined Stilton. A hard cheese, though not as hard as cheddar, it has a distinct flavor thought to come from the salty earth grazed upon by Cheshire cows.

  BY THE SEVENTEENTH century, the English had discovered that salted anchovies would melt into a sauce. This practice may have existed centuries earlier on the continent, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anchovy sauces became extremely popular. Grimod de La Reynière, a great eighteenth-century anchovy sauce enthusiast, wrote, “When this sauce has been made well, it would make you eat an elephant.”

  In 1668, a French writer, Pierre Gontier, stated that “anchovies are put in salt in order that they may be preserved, and they become garum.” Certainly, the English at the time used anchovy sauce very much like garum—a liquid of preserved fish that was added to meat and other dishes as a salty seasoning.

  In eighteenth-century England, anchovy sauce became known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup.

  To make English Katchup

  Take a wide mouth’d bottle, put therin a pint of the best white wine vinegar, putting in ten or twelve cloves of eschalot peeled and just bruised; then take a quarter of a pint of the best langoon white wine, boil it a little, and put to it twelve or fourteen [salt cured] anchovies washed and shred, and dissolve them in the wine, and when cold, put them in the bottle; then take a quarter of a pint more of white wine, and put it in mace, ginger sliced, a few cloves, a spoonful of whole pepper just bruised, and let them boil all a little; when near cold, slice in almost a whole nutmeg, and some lemon peel, and likewise put in two or three spoonfuls of horse radish; then stop it close, and for a week shake it once or twice a day; then use it; it is good to put into fish sauce, or any savory dish of meat; you may add it to clear liquor that comes from mushrooms.—Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife, posthumous 16th edition, 1758

  Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. The names of several other Indonesian sauces also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce. Why would English garum have an Indonesian name? Because the English, starting with the medieval spice trade, looked to Asia for seasoning. Many English condiments, even Worcestershire sauce, invented in the 1840s, are based on Asian ideas.

  Whether it is called garum, anchovy sauce, or ketchup, a large dose of salt was an essential ingredient. Margaret Dods cautioned in her 1829 London cookbook that “catsups, to make them keep well, require a great deal (of salt).” The salt in ketchup originally came from salt-cured fish, and most early anchovy ketchup recipes, such as Eliza Smith’s, do not even list salt as an ingredient because it is part of the anchovies. But the English and Americans began to move away from having fish in their ketchup. It became a mushroom sauce, a walnut sauce, or even a salted lemon sauce. These ketchups originally included salt anchovies, but as Anglo-Saxon cooking lost its boldness, cooks began to see the presence of fish as a strong flavor limiting the usefulness of the condiment. Roman cooks would have been appalled by the lack of temerity, but Margaret Dods adds at the end of her walnut ketchup recipe:

  Anchovies, garlic, cayenne, etc. are sometimes put to this catsup; but we think this is a bad method, as these flavours may render it unsuitable for some dishes, and they can be added extempore when required.—Margaret Dods, Cook and Housewife’s Manual, London, 1829

  Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called “tomato ketchup” in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North. The first known recipe for “tomato ketchup” was by a New Jersey resident. All that is certain about the date is that it had to be before 1782, the year his unfashionable loyalty to the British Crown forced him to flee to Nova Scotia.

  The first published recipe for tomato ketchup appeared in 1812, written by a prominent Philadelphia physician and horticulturist, James Mease. Already in 1804 he had observed, employing the term used for tomatoes in the United States at the time, that “love apples” make “a fine catsup.” Mease said that the condiment was frequently used by the French. The French have never been known for their fondness for tomato ketchup, so it is thought, given the date, that the French he was referring to, were planter refugees from the Haitian revolution. To this day, a tomato sauce is commonly used in Haiti and referred to as sauce creole.

  LOVE-APPLE CATSUP

  Slice the apples thin, and over every layer sprinkle a little salt; cover them, and let them lie twenty-four hours; then beat them well, and simmer them half an hour in a bell-metal kettle; add mace and allspice. When cold, add two cloves of raw shallots cut small, and half a gill of brandy to each bottle, which must be corked tight, and kept in a cool place.—James Mease, Archives of Useful Knowledge, Philadelphia, 1812

  Ketchup remained a salted product. Lydia Maria Child, in her 1829 Boston cookbook, The American Frugal Housewife, advised in making tomato ketchup, “A good deal of salt and spice is needed to keep the product well.”

  AT THE END of the seventeenth century, Cheshire salt was still produced from two brine pits in Middlewich, one in Nantwich, and one at Northwich. If a Chinese salt producer had gone to Cheshire in the 1500s, he would have been appalled by the primitiveness of the technology. Shirtless men climbed down ladders into the pits, filled leather buckets with brine, and climbed out to dump the brine in wooden troughs. Then a web of pipes and gutters channeled the brine to the many salt makers in the area. But by 1636, an account of a visit to the wiches mentioned that pumps had just been installed in Nantwich to raise the brine.

  In the eighteenth century, life in England began to change. England experienced an extremely favorable shift in climate that allowed longer growing seasons and cheaper food. With food prices lowered, many English farms failed. Failed farms in turn created a workforce for industry.

  The English, before anyone else, believed industry was the answer to all problems. Agro
-industry, which abandoned the goal of producing the best food and strived to produce the most per acre, was an English invention. Wheat crops increased enormously. New feed, such as turnips, kept livestock eating all year. Starting with Jethro Tull’s seed-planting drill of 1701, which planted three rows at once, a new agricultural invention, a new crossbred plant, a new strain of livestock, or a new tool was invented almost every year in eighteenth-century Britain. This was the beginning of modern agriculture, a system that would produce enormous surpluses of food in industrialized nations and still fail to end hunger in the world.

  These new developments in agriculture meant that food could be produced throughout the year, which meant less dependency on salt. Less salt seemed a modern idea. But salt production was increasing. Just as the Roman occupiers had run out of peat, English saltworks were now running out of trees.

  The fule which was heretofore used was all wood, which since the iron works is destroyed, that all the wood at any reasonable distance will not supply the works with one quarter of the year; so that now we use almost all pit coal which is brought to us by land, from 13 or 14 miles difference.—Dr. Thomas Rastel, Droitwich, 1678

  By 1650, little was left of the forests of Cheshire. The lead pans by this time were each almost as big as a room and were installed on top of coal-fired furnaces. Hauling coal to Cheshire became a major expense of salt production. Salt makers began to wonder if there might not be coal underneath Cheshire. They were surrounded by coal regions. In Whitehaven, not far north of them in Cumberland, and farther up near Glasgow at the mouth of the Clyde, salt was made and sold at a much lower price than Cheshire’s product because these saltworks had their own coal fields.

  Elizabeth I, concerned about England’s dependence on French salt, had guaranteed state-controlled markets to salt producers along the Tyne in Northumberland. She had chosen that region for stimulating production because it had coal for cheap fuel.

  Cheshire had salt, a river, and an Atlantic port. Its salt makers could have provided salt to a world in which British influence was rapidly expanding—if only they had cheap fuel. The Cheshire salt producers went coal prospecting. In 1670, John Jackson prospected for coal on the estate of William Marbury near Northwich and, at a depth of only 105 feet, found a bed of solid rock salt and no coal at all.

  The Royal Society published the news first with great excitement. Had Jackson discovered the source of underground brine? Was it a buried seabed? In 1682, John Collins wrote of Cheshire, “These springs being remote from the sea are conceived to arise from rocks or Mines of salt under the earth, the which are moistened by some channels or secret passages under ground.”

  But Marbury, disappointed that Jackson had found no coal, did not think to mine the rock salt and went bankrupt in 1690. In 1693, another Cheshire landowner, Sir Thomas Warburton, found rock salt under his estate, and four years later he owned one of four rock salt mines that opened in Cheshire.

  Rock salt did not need fuel, but the immediate reaction of the Cheshire brine boilers was to lobby parliament for a bill banning the mining of rock salt. They believed that the discovery would change the nature of Cheshire, that the small-scale entrepreneur with a modest investment in a well and some lead pans would be pushed out by large and well-capitalized mining companies.

  But with the discovery of rock salt, the growing salt industry gained the economic importance to persuade the government to construct canals. Between 1713 and 1741, the government built a network of waterways linking the saltworks with the Mersey. By the end of the century, salt refineries were being established along the Mersey, and a salt warehouse was built on the Liverpool docks. Coal from south Lancashire on the opposite bank of the Mersey could be transported cheaply by barge. The salt industry, the coal industry, and the port of Liverpool fed off of each other and together grew prosperous.

  Unfortunately for Scotland, Cheshire achieved its new position of power and influence just in time to affect Scotland’s union with England in 1707. After James II, a Catholic, was deposed in England, Presbyterianism was guaranteed for Scotland and the last obstacle to unification was removed. The Scottish and English parliaments merged. But adding Scotland meant bringing Scottish salt into England, and Cheshire merchants had added to the treaty of union numerous stipulations on salt production and pricing aimed at preventing Scottish salt from competing with Cheshire. This was one of several reasons the union had an acrimonious beginning. Almost thirty years before they were joined, John Collins had warned “that unless moderated in its customs” salt competition would breed enmity between England and Scotland.

  Meanwhile, Cheshire salt makers would not give up on the idea that the coal beds around them extended to their region. As late as 1899, they drilled a shaft a mile deep. But again, they found only salt.

  EVEN BEFORE TRUE industrialization had overtaken England, the industrial degradation of the environment was an accepted way of life in Cheshire. Cheshire merchants would look with pride at the sky, blackened twenty-four hours a day from clouds of smoke from the salt pan furnaces, and note the industriousness of their region.

  The forests of Cheshire had been chopped down to fuel furnaces. Barren white scars were etched into the pastureland, where the pan scale, the residue that had to be periodically chipped off the salt pans, was dumped. And the earth itself was beginning to collapse.

  In 1533, it was reported that the land near Combermere, Cheshire, had fallen in, creating a pit that filled with saltwater. In 1657, another little salt pond appeared at Bickley. In 1713, a hole appeared just south of Winsford in a place called Weaver Hall. All of these funnel-shaped holes were in proximity to salt production, and they all immediately filled with brine. Many locals believed that the holes were the result of abandoned salt mines collapsing. But mining interests pointed out that the sinkholes were not appearing near abandoned shafts. By the last two decades of the eighteenth century, when a new hole sunk every year or two, it started to appear that there was a relationship between the increasing quantities of salt being produced and the collapsing of the earth.

  DESPITE CHESHIRE’S GROWING production, England still had that same dangerous dependence on foreign salt that had worried Queen Elizabeth. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was a recurring topic of concern, especially since much of the foreign salt came from England’s principal enemy, France. On land campaigns, each British soldier received a huge ration of salt so that he could acquire fresh meat along his march and salt it to use as needed. The British navy was provisioned with salt and salt foods. Salt was strategic, like gunpowder, which was also made from salt.

  In 1746, Thomas Lowndes, a Cheshire native, wrote a book-length report to the admiralty on developing Britain’s own sea salt supply. After studying French and Dutch salt, he, with great excitement, announced that he had discovered the secret of superior salt:

  This is the Process

  Let a Cheshire Salt-pan (which commonly contains about eight hundred gallons) be filled with Brine, to within about an inch of the top; then make and light the fire; and when the Brine is just lukewarm, put in about an ounce of blood from the butcher’s, or the whites of two eggs: let the pan boil with all possible violence; as the scum rises take it off; when the fresh or watery part is pretty well decreased, throw into the pan the third part of a pint of new ale, or that quantity of bottoms of malt drink: upon the Brine’s beginning to grain, throw into it the quantity of a small nutmeg of fresh butter; and when the liquor has salted for about half an hour, that is, has produced a good deal of salt, draw the pan, in other words, take out the salt. By this time the fire will be greatly abated, and so will the heart of the liquor. Let no more fuel be thrown on the fire; but let the brine gently cool, till one can just bear to put one’s hand into it: keep the brine of that heat as near as possible; and when it has worked for some time, and is beginning to grain, throw in the quantity of a small nutmeg of fresh butter, and about two minutes after that, scatter threw the pan, as equally as may
be, an ounce and three quarters of clean common allom pulverized very fine; and then instantly, with the common iron-scrape-pan, stir the brine very briskly in every part of the pan, for about a minute: then let the pan settle, and constantly feed the fire, so that the brine may never be quite scalding hot, nor near so cold as lukewarm: let the pan stand working thus, for about three days and nights, and then draw it.

  The brine remaining will by this time be so cold, that it will not work at all; therefore fresh coals must be thrown upon the fire, and the brine must boil for about half an hour, but not near so violently as before the first drawing: then, with the usual instrument, take out such salt as is beginning to fall, (as they term it) and out it apart; now let the pan settle and cool. When the brine becomes no hotter than one can just bear to put one’s hand into it, proceed in all respects as before; only let the quantity of allom not exceed an ounce and a quarter. And in about eight and forty hours after draw the pan.—Thomas Lowndes, Brine-salt Improved, or The Method of Making Salt from Brine, That Shall Be as Good or Better Than French Bay-salt, 1746

  Lowndes assured the admiralty, “The greater the quantity is of salt made my way, the more satisfied the public will be, that my secret is truly made known.” But, understandably, some found his secret to be excessive for just making salt, a product whose commercial success depended on low production costs. Two years later, the physician William Brownrigg in a widely distributed work, The Art of Making Common Salt, criticized Lowndes’ formula, writing that “a purer and stronger salt can be made, and at less expense.”

  Cheshire salt needed to be not only better but, even more important, cheaper. Almost seventy-five years earlier, Dr. Thomas Rastel of Droitwich had written that Droitwich had simplified salt making, eliminating the cost of blood used in Cheshire brine by making an egg white scum, a technique still used in cooking to remove impurities in meat stocks for a clear aspic: