Salt Pt. 1


When you cook, salt is always on your mind – too little, too much... Forget it and some folks won't eat the food it's laying on; put one pinch too many down and the salty faced frown comes out.  Even at the highest levels, on the cooking shows, how the chef applies salt might very well make the difference between the contender going home with ten grand or a fist full of nothing.  It is a seasoning that is generally taken for granted, always present, on tables, in recipes, on cooks' minds.  But it turns out that salt is exclusively the only rock humans eat. Ancient empires have flourished or declined depending on its advantages in salt resources and trading.  From the intro. material in Salt, A World History

we find out that scientists estimate that the human body needs anywhere from 2/3 of a pound to 16 pounds of salt annually to survive.  In our ancient human past, we probably didn't sit around newly conceived cooking fires to estimate this, but Kurlansky goes on to point out the obvious, that hunting cultures which got their salt from animals didn't unknowingly need it, but for other more agricultural cultures, they had to go out and seek salt sources.  "Salt deficiency causes headaches and weakness, then light-headedness, then nausea.  If deprived long enough, the victim will die.  But at no time in this process is a craving for salt experienced.  However, most people choose to eat far more salt than they need, and perhaps this urge – the simple fact that we like the taste of salt – is a natural defense." When we think of this last part and modern society, we can easily see that abundance doesn't stop us necessarily from over doing it.  Hypertension and cultural obesity being a couple of the health problems associated with salt we now face.

Going back in time, to at least A.D. 100, the Chinese figured out that you could dig wells for brine which could be reduced down to usable salt.  They would dig so deep for brine as to encounter what they thought was an invisible substance – 'evil spirits' – which, when lit, could be used to cook by, and eventually piped in long and elaborate networks of bamboo, using gravity and water for pressure,

pushed along to boiling houses where the brine cooked until the water evaporated and left salt crystals.  Interestingly, it was from this salt mining network concept the Chinese learned to build irrigation and plumbing systems.  As Kurlansky says in summary, "By the Middle Ages, the time of the Norman conquest of England, Su Dongpo, a bureaucrat born in Sichuan, was building sophisticated bamboo urban plumbing."  From ancient rollercoaster-like brine pumps, to making double chocolate chip cookies and a smoked whole chicken, we've come a long way in how we see and use salt.