Salt (13 page)

A
FTER THE FALL
of Rome in the fifth century, garum was often thought of as just one of the unpleasant hedonistic excesses for which Rome was remembered. Leaving fish organs in the sun to rot was not an idea that endured in less extravagant cultures. Of course when garum was made properly, the salt prevented rotting until the fermentation took hold. But it became increasingly difficult to convince people of this. Anthimus, living in sixth-century Gaul, in a culture that was leaving Rome behind, rejected garum for salt or even brine:

Loin of pork is best eaten roasted, because it is a good food and well digested, provided that, while it is roasting, it is spread with feathers dipped in brine. If the loin of pork is rather tough when eaten, it is better to dip in pure salt. We ban the use of fish sauce from every culinary role.—
Anthimis,
De obseruatione ciborum
(On the Observance of Foods), circa
A.D.
500

Anthimus’s pronouncement on garum has echoed through Western cooking: “
Nam liquamen ex omni parte prohibemus,
” We ban the use of garum from every culinary role.

Sardines, which got their name from being a highly praised salt fish cured in Sardinia, were favored for garum. Gargilius Martialis, writing in the third century
A.D.
, specified sardines for making garum. Modern divers examining a shipwreck off of southeastern Sicily found fifty Roman amphorae containing salted sardines. But in later centuries, sardines became better appreciated fresh with a sprinkling of salt.

Sardines: In their natural state they should be fried; when done, garnish them with orange juice and a little of the frying oil and salt; they are eaten hot.
—
Cuoco Napoletano,
anonymous, Naples, late 1400s

After the fall of Rome, garum vanished from the Mediterranean, the region lost its importance as a salt fish producer, and the purple dye industry faded. But the Roman idea that building saltworks was part of building empires endured.

CHAPTER FIVE

Salting It Away in the Adriatic

T
HE FALL OF
the Roman Empire left the Mediterranean, the most economically important region of the Western world, without a clear leader but with many aspirants. The region was the most competitive it had been since the rise of the Phoenicians.

The entire coast of the Mediterranean was studded with saltworks, some small local operations, others big commercial enterprises such as the ones in Constantinople and the Crimea. The ancient Mediterranean saltworks that had been started by the Phoenicians, like power itself, passed from Romans to Byzantines to Muslims.

The saltworks that the Romans had praised remained the most valued. Egyptian salt from Alexandria was highly appreciated, especially their
fleur de sel,
the light crystals skimmed off the surface of the water. Salt from Egypt, Trapani, Cyprus, and Crete all had great standing because they had been mentioned by Pliny in Roman times.

V
ENICE, THE ONE
Italian city that was not part of Roman history, was settled on islands in the lagoons in the Adriatic. The coast of Venetia was substantially different than it is today. A series of sandbars, called
lidi
, sheltered lagoons from the storms of the Adriatic. These lagoons stretched from Ravenna, the commercial and political center of the Venetian coast, up the estuary of the Po River to Aquileia, on the opposite side of the Adriatic next to Trieste. Lido has become the name of a sandbar in Venice, particularly popular with the hordes of tourists who now wander the streets and canals of that city. But even in Roman times, the lidi were for tourists, summer resorts for affluent Romans.

In the sixth century, the mainland, what had been the Roman province of Veneto, was invaded by Germanic tribes. To preserve their independence, small groups of people, like Bostonians fleeing to Martha’s Vineyard, moved to the islands protected by their summer vacation lidi.

Cassiodorus, a sixth-century high Roman official turned monastic scholar, admired these settlements in the lagoons. He likened their houses, part on land and part on sea, to aquatic birds.

Rich and poor live together in equality. The same food and similar houses are shared by all; wherefore they cannot envy each other’s hearths, and so they are free from the vices that rule the world. All your emulation centers on the saltworks; instead of ploughs and scythes, you work rollers [for salt production] whence comes all your gain. Upon your industry all other products depend for, although there may be someone who does not seek gold, there never yet lived the man who does not desire salt, which makes every food more savory.—
Cassiodorus,
A.D.
523.

As with Rome, Venetian democracy was more of an ideal than a practice. But, though Cassiodorus may have been overly enthusiastic about Venetian egalitarianism, the importance that he attributed to salt in Venice was not exaggerated. Salt was the key to a policy that made Venice the dominant commercial force of southern Europe.

The Italian mainland was originally much farther away from the islands that are now the city of Venice. The area between these islands and the peninsula of Comacchio was called the Seven Seas. “To sail the seven seas” meant simply sailing the Seven Seas—accomplishing the daunting task of navigating past the sandbars of those treacherous twenty-five miles.

About
A.D.
600, Venetians started using landfill to extend the mainland closer to the islands of modern-day Venice. The Seven Seas became a landmass with a port named Chioggia. Below it, in a now much-narrowed lagoon, was Comacchio, overlooking the delta of the Po. Ravenna, formerly a port, became an inland city, and nearby Cervia became its port.

By the seventh century, with the Seven Seas gone, the Venetians built salt ponds along the newly formed land of Chioggia. Cassiodorus wrote that the Venetians were using “rollers,” but sometimes this is translated as “tubes” or “cylinders.” It is not clear if he was speaking of rollers to smooth down the floors of artificial evaporation ponds or cylindrical pottery to boil seawater into crystals. Both techniques had been common in Rome.

Between the sixth and ninth centuries, the last great technical advance in salt manufacturing until the twentieth century was invented. Instead of trapping seawater in a single artificial pond, closing it off, and waiting for the sun to evaporate the water, the salt makers built a series of ponds. The first, a large open tank, had a system of pumps and sluices that moved the pond’s seawater to the next pond, after it reached a heightened salinity. There the water evaporated further, and a still denser brine was moved to the next pond. At the same time, fresh seawater was let into the first pond so that a fresh batch of brine was always beginning. When brine reaches a sufficient density, salt precipitates out—it crystalizes, and the crystals fall to the bottom of the pond, where they can be scooped out. In a pond with only solar heat, it may take a year or more for seawater to reach this density. But given sufficient sun and wind and a season dry enough not to have rainfall dilute the ponds, the only limit to production is the available area, the number of ponds that can operate simultaneously. It requires little equipment, a very small investment, and, except for the final scraping stage, the harvest, little manpower.

Some Western historians believe that the Chinese may have been the first to develop this technique around
A.D.
500. But Chinese historians, who are loath to pass up founder’s rights to any invention, lay no claim to this one. The Chinese were not pleased with the salt produced by this technique. Slow evaporation results in coarse salt, and the Chinese have always considered fine-grained salt to be of higher quality.

The idea of successive evaporation ponds seems to have started in the Mediterranean, where coarse salt was valued for salting fish and curing hams. The North African Muslims operating in the early Middle Ages throughout the Mediterranean may have been the first to use such a system, introducing it to Ibiza in the ninth century.

By the tenth century, multiple ponds were being used on the Dalmatian coast, across the Adriatic from Venice. In 965, ponds were built in Cervia, and by the eleventh century, the Venetians had built a pond system.

Venice had intense competition on its little strip of the Adriatic. Close to Venice’s Chioggia was Comacchio, where Benedictine monks produced salt. In 932, the Venetians ended that competition by destroying the saltworks at Comacchio. But this served to strengthen the position of the third important saltworks in the area, Cervia, controlled by the archbishop of the nearby no-longer-coastal city of Ravenna.

For a time the two principal salt competitors in the region were the commune of Venice and the archbishop of Ravenna—Chioggia and Cervia. Venice had the advantage because Chioggia was more productive than Cervia. But Chioggia produced
sali minutti
, a fine-grained salt. When Venetians wanted coarser salt, they had to import it. Then, in the thirteenth century, after a series of floods and storms destroyed about a third of the ponds in Chioggia, the Venetians were forced to import even more salt.

That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer.