Salt Page 9

  The cheese makers also mixed whey with whole milk once a week to make fresh ricotta. By tradition ricotta was made on Thursday so that the cheese would be ready for Sunday’s traditional tortelli d’erbette. Erbette literally means “grass,” but in Parma it is also the name of a local green similar to Swiss chard. Tortelli d’erbette is a ravioli-like pasta stuffed with ricotta, Parmigiano cheese, erbette, salt, and two spices that were a passion in the thirteenth century and highly profitable cargo for the ships of both Venice and Genoa: black pepper and nutmeg. Tortelli d’erbette was and still is served with nothing but butter and grated Parmigiano cheese.

  Before it succumbed to being heavily salted, butter was a rare delicacy. That was especially true in the Po Valley at the southern extreme of butter’s range in Europe. In the Parma area, butter was a privilege of the cheese masters—theirs to distribute or sell, generally at high prices. Butter is still sold in the Parmigiano-Reggiano area by cheese masters.

  Stuffed pasta in butter sauce worked particular well in this region where the local wheat was soft, different from the rest of Italy, and produced a pasta that, when mixed with eggs, was rich and supple when fresh, but brittle and unworkable when dried. Dried pasta, like olive oil, belonged to the rest of Italy.

  Each creamery had a cheese master whose hands reached into the copper vats and ran through the whey with knowing fingers, scooping up and pressing the curds as they were forming. When he said the cheese was done, a cheesecloth was put into the vat, and under his direction the corners of the cloth were lifted, hoisting from the whey more than 180 pounds of drained curd. While the others struggled to suspend the mass in the cheesecloth, only the cheese master was allowed to take the big, flat, two-handed knife and divide the mass in two.

  The two cheeses were left one day in cheesecloth and then put in wooden molds. The Latin word for a wooden cheese mold, forma, is the root of the Italian word for cheese, formaggio. After at least three days, the ninety-pound cheeses were floated in a brine bath turned every day. The aging of cheese is a matter of its slow absorption of salt. It takes two years for the salt to reach the center of a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. After that the cheese begins to dry out. So these cheeses have always had one year of life between when they are sold and when they are considered too hard and dry, even too salty. Platina’s admonition about aged cheese may have been a concern about overly aged cheese.

  Prosciutto makers used salt from Salsomaggiore, but cheese makers used sea salt supplied either by Venice or by Genoa. In the sixteenth century, the powerful Farnesi family arranged 5,000 mule caravans to carry salt from Genoa’s Ligurian coast, known today as the Italian Riviera. Caravans from Genoa carried salt inland to Piacenza, where it was placed on river barges and carried down the Po to Parma. Unlike in Africa or ancient Rome, no single salt route was established. Each caravan had to devise a route based on arrangements with the feudal lords along the way.

  Inland cities of the Po Valley such as Parma had their own salt policies and derived revenue from the import of Venetian or Genoese salt, a cost which was passed on to their local consumers. This created a permanent salt contraband trade along the back routes between Genoa, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio, Bologna, and Venice.

  In exchange for the salt, the Po Valley traded its salt products: salami, prosciutto, and cheese. It also traded its famous soft wheat for salt. The trade changed with the times. In the eighteenth century, when the Bourbons ruled Parma, they traded their French luxury items for salt, but they also exchanged galley slaves for salt with Genoa, which needed galley slaves for its expanding trade empire. In Parma, a ten-year prison sentence could be reduced to five years as a galley slave on a Genoese ship. But most of these slaves lived only two years, which caused a constant need for replacements.

  IN THE FIFTH century B.C., before Genoa was Roman, it was the thriving port of a local people called the Ligurians. It was taken by Rome, by Carthage, by Rome again, by Germanic tribes, by Muslims. Finally, in the twelfth century it became, like Venice, an independent city-state dedicated to commerce.

  Genoa bought salt from Hyères near Toulon in French Provence. The name Hyères means “flats” and probably refers to salt flats, because as far back as is known, salt was produced in this place. But in the twelfth century, Genoese merchants turned Hyères into an important producer by building a system of solar evaporation ponds. Genoa’s success in Hyères led to the decline of Pisa’s Sardinian salt trade. Genoese salt merchants then moved into Sardinia, developed the saltworks of Cagliari, again building a system of evaporation ponds, and made Sardinia one of the largest salt producers in the Mediterranean.

  The Genoese also bought salt from Tortosa on the Mediterranean coast of Iberia, south of Barcelona. Tortosa is at the mouth of the Ebro River, which gave it a water connection from Catalonia through Aragon to Basque country—a waterway through the most economically developed parts of the Iberian Peninsula. Tortosa had been a salt producer for the Moors, but by the twelfth century, when Genoa became involved, it was one of the principal suppliers of the port of Barcelona as well as Aragon.

  In the mountainous interior of Catalonia, the dukes of Cardona were not happy to see the Genoese selling salt in Barcelona. In 886, a man about whom little is known except possibly his appearance, Wilfredo the Hairy rebuilt an abandoned eighth-century castle on a mountain fifty miles inland from Barcelona. Alone on what was then a distant mountaintop, the highest peak in a rugged, sparsely populated area, he could peer from the thick stone ramparts at his prize possession, the source of his wealth, the next mountain.

  This next mountain was striped in pattern and colors so lively, it was almost dizzying to look at it—salmon pink rock with white, taupe, and bloodred stripes. It was all salt. Since salt is soluble in water, elongated facets were cut into the mountain by each rainfall. Inside the mine the pink-striped shafts were ornamented by snow-white crystal stalactites, long dangling tentacles where the salt had sealed over dripping rainwater from fissures above. The salt mountain was by a winding river, a shallow tributary of the Ebro. Rich green plains and gentle terraced slopes were farmed in the distance, and on the horizon, the snow-crested peaks of the Pyrenees could be seen.

  An engraving of Cardona from Voyage pittoresque et historique de l’Espagne (1807–1818). The castle is on the highest hill, the salt mountain below, by the river. The town where the salt workers lived can be seen in the distance. Biblioteca de Catalunya

  The lords who occupied the castle were the owners of the mountain. A dank brown village of salt workers sprang up on an adjacent mountain. On Thursdays, the salt workers were allowed to take salt for themselves. Starting at least in the sixteenth century, salt workers carved figurines, often religious, from the rock, which has the appearance of pink marble. Soft and soluble, rock salt is easy to carve and even easier to polish.

  Even in the area around the salt mountain, all but the top two to three feet of soil is salt, and the white powder leaches to the surface when it rains. There is evidence that people took salt from here as far back as 3500 B.C. Prehistoric stone tools have been found—six-inch-long black rocks with one end serving as a pick and the other as a scraping tool.

  The first written record of salt in Cardona is from the Romans, who usually favored sea salt but considered Cardona’s rock salt to be of high quality. In the ninth century, the dukes of Cardona, along with the other feudal lords of the Catalan-speaking area, were united under the counts of Barcelona. Catalonia, with its own Latin-based language, became an important commercial power whose territory extended along the Mediterranean coast from north of the Pyrenees to southern Spain.

  Cardona was known in medieval Catalonia as an ideal source of salt for making hams and sausages. From the capital, the port of Barcelona, Cardona salt was exported to Europe and became one of the leading rock salts in the Middle Ages. But by the twelfth century, Genoa could bring salt by sea to Barcelona less expensively than the dukes of Cardona could bring it across the fifty-mile land r
oute. As Cardona salt merchants started to lose their Barcelona market, they too began selling their salt to the Genoese.

  AFTER 1250, GENOA went even farther into the Mediterranean, buying salt in the Black Sea, North Africa, Cyprus, Crete, and Ibiza—many of the same saltworks that Venice was trying to dominate. Genoa built Ibiza into the largest salt producer in the region.

  Salt was the engine of Genoese trade. With the salt the Genoese bought, they made salami, which was sold in southern Italy for raw silk, which was sold in Lucca for fabrics, which were sold to the silk center of Lyon. Genoa competed with Venice not only for salt but for the other cargoes that were exchanged for salt, such as textiles and spices.

  The Genoese were pioneers in maritime insurance, banking, and the use of huge Atlantic-sized ships, which they bought or leased from the Basques, in Mediterranean trade. These ships, with their vast cargo holds, had room for salt on a return voyage. Wherever they went for trade, they made a point of getting control of a saltworks at which to load up for the return trip.

  But Venice was winning the competition because of a more cohesive political organization and because of its system of salt subsidies. When this salt competition led to a war in 1378–80, known as the War of Chioggia, Venice’s ability to convert its commercial fleet into warships proved decisive. Venice defeated Genoa, its only major competitor for commercial dominance of the Mediterranean.

  Yet among those who finally undid the maritime empire of Venice were two Genoese—Cristoforo Colombo and Giovanni Caboto. Neither sailed on behalf of Genoa, and Caboto actually became a Venetian citizen. The beginning of the end came in 1488 when the Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Dias rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. In 1492, Columbus, in search of another route to India in the opposite direction, began a series of voyages for Spain, which opened up trans-Atlantic trade carrying new and valuable spices. Then in 1497, Caboto, the Genoese turned Venetian, sailed for England as John Cabot, again looking for a route to India, and told the world about North America and its wealth of codfish. Worst of all, that same year, another Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, sailed around Africa to India and returned to Portugal two years later. Not only were Atlantic ports now needed for trade with the newly found lands, but the Portuguese had opened the way from Atlantic ports to the Indian Ocean and the spice producers. Now the Atlantic, and not the Mediterranean, was the most important body of water for trade.

  After the fifteenth century, the Mediterranean ceased to be the center of the Western world, and Venice’s location was no longer advantageous. Yet it stubbornly held to its independence and so declined with the Mediterranean.

  Genoa succumbed to the new reality, and during Spain’s golden age, the Genoese served as the leading bankers and financiers of that expanding Atlantic power. Because of this, Genoa has endured as a commercial center and is today a leading Mediterranean port, though the Mediterranean is no longer a leading sea.

  PART TWO

  The Glow of Herring and the Scent of Conquest

  At the time when Pope Pius VII had to leave Rome, which had been conquered by revolutionary French, the committee of the Chamber of Commerce in London was considering the herring fishery. One member of the committee observed that, since the Pope had been forced to leave Rome, Italy was probably going to become a Protestant country. “Heaven help us,” cried another member. “What,” responded the first, “would you be upset to see the number of good Protestants increase?” “No,” the other answered, “it isn’t that, but suppose there are no more Catholics, what shall we do with our herring?”

  —Alexandre Dumas,

  Le grand dictionnaire de cuisine, 1873

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Friday’s Salt

  BY THE SEVENTH century A.D., all of western Europe spoke Indo-European languages—languages that stemmed from the Bronze Age Asian invasion of Europe—except for the Basques. In their small mountainous land on the Atlantic coast, partly in what was to become Spain and partly in the future France, Basque culture, language, and laws had survived all the great invasions, including those of the Celts and the Romans.

  The Basques were different. One of those differences was that they hunted whales. They were the first commercial whale hunters, ahead of all others by several centuries. The earliest record of commercial whaling is a bill of sale from the year 670 to northern France for forty pots of whale oil from the Basque coastal province of Labourd, which is now in France.

  Through the centuries of commercial whaling that would follow, the oil boiled from whale fat would be the most consistently valuable part of the whale. Whalebone was also profitable, especially the hundreds of teeth, which were a particularly durable form of ivory. But, in the Middle Ages, Basque fortunes were made trading the tons of fat and red meat that could be stripped from each whale.

  The medieval Catholic Church forbade the eating of meat on religious days, and, in the seventh century, the number of these days was dramatically expanded. The Lenten fast, a custom started in the fourth century, was increased to forty days, and in addition all Fridays, the day of Christ’s crucifixion, were included. In all, about half the days of the year became “lean” days, and food prohibitions for these days were strictly enforced. Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. The law remained on the books until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with the Vatican.

  On lean days sex was forbidden, and eating was to be limited to one meal. Red meat was “hot” and therefore banned because it was associated with sex. However, animals found in water—which included the tails but not the bodies of beavers, sea otters, porpoises, and whales—were deemed cool, and acceptable food for religious days.

  For this reason, porpoise is included in most medieval food manuscripts. But the recipes usually call for costly ingredients, indicating that porpoise was not food for the poor. The following English recipe, with its expensive Asian spices, is from a manuscript dated between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though the recipe may be much older.

  PURP YN GALENTEYN

  Take purpays: do away the skyn; cut hit yn smal lechys [slices] no more than a fynger, or les. Take bred drawen wyth red wyne; put therto powder of canell [cinnamon], powder of pepyr. Boil hit; seson hit up with powder of gynger, venegre, & salt.

  Fresh whale meat was also for the rich. The great delicacy was the tongue. Salted tongue of any kind was appreciated, but especially whale tongue. For the poor, there was craspois, also called craspoix, or grapois. This was strips of the fattier parts of the whale, salt-cured like bacon and sometimes called in French lard de carême, which translates as “lent blubber,” because it was one of the principal foods available to the peasantry for lean days on which other red meats were not allowed. Even after a full day of cooking, craspoix was said to be tough and hard. It was eaten with peas, which was the way the rich ate their whale tongue. Nevertheless, Rouen merchants who sold craspoix to the English paid high tariffs at London Bridge, which suggests this salted whale blubber was a luxury product in England. This would not be the last time the food of French peasants was sold as a treat for wealthy Englishmen.

  In 1393, an affluent and elderly Parisian, whose name has been lost, published a lengthy volume of instructions to his fifteen-year-old bride on the running of a household. The book, known as Le mèsnagier de Paris, offers this recipe:

  Craspoix. This is salted whale meat. It should be cut in slices uncooked and cooked in water like fatback: serve it with peas.

  Peas at the time were dried and cooked as beans are today, so that this dish resembled pork and beans.

  On lean days, when the peas are cooked, you have to take onions that have been cooked in a pot for as long as the peas, exactly the same way that on meat days, lard is cooked separately in the pot and then peas and stock added. In that same way, on a lean day, at the time the peas are put in a pot on the fire, you should put finely chopped onions and in a separate pot cook the peas. When everything is cooked, fry the onions, put half
in the peas and half in the stock—and salt. If that day is during Lent get crapoix and use it the same way that lard is used on meat days.—Le mèsnagier de Paris, 1393

  BY THE SEVENTH century, the Basques built stone towers on high points of land along their coast. The remains of two still stand. When the lookout in the tower spied a whale, its great shiny black back breaking the surface while spouting vapor, he would shout a series of coded cries that told whalers where and how big the whale was, and how many other whales were nearby. Five oarsmen, a captain, and a harpooner would silently row out, hoping to spear the giant unaware. The Basques, who have always had a reputation for physical strength, made their harpooners legendary—large men of great power who could plunge a spear deep into the back of a sleeping giant.

  By the ninth century, when the Basques had a well-established whaling business, an intruder arrived—the Vikings. Viking is a term—thought to have its root in the old Norse vika, meaning “to go off”—for Scandinavians who left their native land to seek wealth in commerce. They did not have a central location like Genoa or Venice, and their northern home provided them with little to trade. If they had had a source of salt, they might have traded salted meats like the Celts or salted fish like the Phoenicians. But without salt, meat and fish were too perishable, and all the Vikings had to trade were tools made from walrus tusk and reindeer antler. In search of a trading commodity, they raided coastal communities in northern Europe, kidnapped people, and sold them into slavery, which is why they are still remembered for their brutality.

  But they were ingenious people, superb shipbuilders, intrepid mariners, and savvy traders. For their captured slaves, they received payment in silver, silks, glassware, and other luxuries that transformed life for the upper classes in Scandinavia. With their fast-sailing ships, they raided the coasts of Britain and France. Starting in 845, these raids turned into campaigns involving large groups. Vikings held territory in the vicinity of the Thames and Loire Rivers, which they used as bases for both raiding and trading at even greater distances. They traded with Russia, Byzantium, and the Middle East. Great European cities, including both London and Paris, paid the Vikings to be left in peace.