Salt (22 page)

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Fasterbö and Skanör in southern Sweden became major herring producers. They imported salt from the Hanseatic German port of Lübeck and exported their cured herring back to Lübeck to be marketed throughout Europe. All of this trade was carried on Hanseatic ships. At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, the Hanseatics were believed to have had at their command 40,000 vessels and 300,000 men.

For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word
sterling,
which meant “of assured value.” The Hanseatics are still honored by a street name—Esterlines Street—in the medieval port district of the Basque city of San Sebastián.

But in time they were seen as ruthless aggressors who wanted to monopolize all economic activity, and the merchant class rebelled against them. To control herring and salt was to control northern economies. In 1360, the Danes went to war with the Hanseatics over control of herring and lost. By 1403, when the Hanseatic League gained complete control of Bergen, Norway, it had achieved a monopoly on northern European production of herring and salt but not without constant warfare with rebellious Baltic states. In 1406, the Hanseatics caught ninety-six British fishermen off Bergen, tied their hands and feet, and threw them overboard.

Baltic herring started to vanish—perhaps too much adultery was being committed in Baltic villages—and the North Sea catches became larger than ever. Suddenly the strömming had vanished and the sill abounded. This strengthened the English and the Dutch and weakened the Hanseatic League. Slowly the British and Dutch gained enough economic and military might to overwhelm the cartel. This was especially true after colonization gave them North American fisheries.

But once the Hanseatic League began to fade, the Dutch and British were still in competition. Their herring fisheries, which became the European leaders, faced each other across the North Sea in Brielle on the Dutch side and Yarmouth on the English side.

The seasonal arrival of the herring shoals became essential to the economies of both England and Holland. In medieval England, every spring, lookouts were posted along the important seaward points of eastern Britain to spot the arrival of the herring. The lookouts would point with a stick to indicate the direction the shoal was swimming from the first point off Crane Head in the Shetlands in early June until they reached Yarmouth in September. In Yarmouth, as early as the fourteenth century, the annual fair marking the end of the herring season, held from September 29 until November 10, attracted herring merchants from the rest of Europe.

Like the Venetian salt fleet, the huge Dutch herring fleet was trained as an armed naval force that fought numerous wars in Europe and the Caribbean against the British professional navy. Finally, in 1652, the British navy destroyed the Dutch herring fleet. In time, the Dutch made peace with the British. England got a Dutch king. But this still left the French, who had their own herring fleets and every intention of controlling salt and being a world power.

CHAPTER NINE

A Well-Salted Hexagon

I
N A 1961
speech, Charles de Gaulle, explaining the ungovernable character of the French nation, said, “Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese.” The reason for the variety is that, given its limited area, the amalgamation that became France had a remarkable diversity of climates, topography, and cultures. The nation was slowly constructed from feudal kingdoms. It included Burgundians and Provençals, Germanic-speaking Alsatians, Celtic-speaking Bretons, Basques, and Catalans. The Hexagon, as the French would come to call it, bordered the Lowlands, the Rhine, the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees, the Atlantic, and the English Channel, which the French have never called English but simply La Manche, the sleeve, a word that refers to its long and narrow shape. The Hexagon offered a wealth of salt: rock salt, brine springs, and both Mediterranean and Atlantic sea salt.

The royal tables of the diverse medieval and Renaissance French kingdoms were set with huge, ornate
nefs
, ships, in this case jeweled vessels holding salt. A nef was both a saltcellar and a symbol of the “ship of state.” Salt symbolized both health and preservation. Its message was that the ruler’s health was the stability of the nation.

In 1378, Charles V of France hosted a famous dinner that posed the awkward question of where to place the nef. Should it be in front of him or by his guest Charles IV, the Prague-born Holy Roman Emperor? And what about the emperor’s son who was also joining them, King Wenceslaus of Germany, who would become emperor after his father’s death later that same year? It was decided that the table had to be set with three large nefs, one for each of the three monarchs.

Richard II, the fourteenth-century British monarch whose unpopularity was attributed to both his gaudy extravagance and his lackluster pursuit of the Hundred Years War with France, had a nef on his table with figures of eight tiny men on the ship deck hoisting the flags of France. The unusual nef had no shortage of admirers, since Richard employed 2,000 chefs and was said to have entertained 10,000 visitors daily, most of whom stayed for dinner.

In the fifteenth century, Jean, duc de Berry, featured on his banquet table a gold ship that held not only salt but pepper, as well as, according to some accounts, powdered unicorn horn. Since it is doubtful that anyone has ever seen a unicorn, the powder may have been from the tusk of a narwhal, a single-horned relative of the whale. Unicorn horn was believed to be a poison antidote, which many monarchs wanted to have close-by at mealtime. Some nefs contained “serpent’s tongue,” which was actually shark’s tooth, for the same purpose. The compartments in nefs were frequently locked.

Elaborate saltcellars in all forms, not only ships, were popular. In addition to his nef, in 1415 the duc de Berry, a notable patron of the arts, received from the artist Paul de Limbourg an agate saltcellar with gold lid and a sapphire knob with four pearls.

In the sixteenth century, when things Italian were especially fashionable, Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine high-Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith, made a saltcellar for King François I of France, perennial war maker and insatiable art enthusiast. The dish of salt was held between the figure of Neptune, god of the sea, and the earth goddess—salt between its two sources, sea and earth. By Neptune’s knee was a temple with a tiny drawer for pepper.

In addition to an elaborate saltcellar, referred to as the Great Salt, lesser saltcellars would be removed from the table and others brought out with changing courses. The Great Salt stayed by the master or host or most honored guest throughout the meal.

Benvenuto Cellini’s saltcellar for François I.
Kuntshistorisches
Museum, Vienna

It was considered rude, sometimes even unlucky, to touch salt with the fingers. Salt was taken from the cellar on the tip of a knife and a small pile put on the diner’s plate. Some medieval and Renaissance plates had a small depression for salt.

Placing salt on the table was a rich man’s luxury, but all classes ate salted foods. In 1268, the
Livre des métiers,
the Book of Trades, which listed the rules of the cooking profession, said that cooked meat could be kept for only three days unless it had been salted.
Le mèsnagier de Paris
gave recipes for not only salted whale, but also beef, mutton, venison, coot (an aquatic bird), goose, hare, and a great number of pork products. Although salting was often done in the home, it was usually not women’s work. The medieval French, like the Chinese, believed that the presence of women could be destructive to fermentation. In France, a menstruating woman is said to be
en salaison,
curing in salt. It was dangerous to have a woman in a room full of fermenting food when she herself was in fermentation. “It will spoil the lard,” people would say.

Originally, salting was a way to keep food through the winter, but by the Middle Ages such foods were eaten year-round.

In June and July pieces of salted beef and mutton should be well cooked in water with green onions after having rested in salt from morning to evening or for a day or more.—Le Mèsnagier de Paris,
1393

A food that typifies the French love of salted foods is the
choucroute
of Alsace and Lorraine. Alsace, known as Elsass in German, was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and France did not add it to its Hexagon until 1697. The Alsatian language is a dialect of German. Choucroute appears to have evolved from German sauerkraut. But the French, having a resistance to acknowledging German origins in their culture, argue that the Chinese salted cabbage, and the Tartars made it, and, always the favorite French source for foreign food, Catherine de Médicis might have introduced it. Catherine was a sixteenth-century Florentine who married the future Henri II of France and moved to his country with many Italian food ideas.

In a popular French legend, superstar Sarah Bernhardt went to a Chinese restaurant in Paris and ordered choucroute. The waiter fetched the maître d’, who with a suggestion of indignation informed the actress, “This is a Chinese restaurant, Madame.”

“Mais oui, Monsieur,” the actress supposedly replied. “Choucroute is a Chinese invention.”

The Chinese may not have invented it. Scientists have found evidence of early hunters curing a leaf that resembled cabbage. But the Chinese have been pickling vegetables for millennia, and cabbage was one of the first vegetables used.

The Romans made sauerkraut and were great cabbage enthusiasts. Cato suggested that women would live long, healthy lives if they washed their genitals in the urine of a cabbage eater. He was listened to on health matters, since in an age of short lives and high infant mortality he lived to be over eighty and claimed to have fathered twenty-eight sons, all of which he credited to eating cabbage with salt and vinegar.

On the other side, Platina, from fifteenth-century Cremona, had warned against it:

It is agreed that cabbage is of a warm and dry nature and for this reason increases black bile, generates bad dreams, is not very nourishing, harms the stomach a little and the head and eyes very much, on account of its gas, and dims the vision.

The Alsatian word for choucroute,
surkrut
, resembles the German,
sauerkraut
. Both words have the same meaning: sour or pickled grass. The German princess Palatine, sister-in-law to Louis XIV, claimed to have introduced the dish to the court at Versailles. She wrote back to her sister in Germany, “I have also made Westphalian-type raw hams fashionable here. Everyone eats them now, and they also eat many of our German foods—sauerkraut, and sugared cabbage, as well as cabbage with fat bacon, but it is hard to get it of good quality.” She sent to Germany for cabbage seeds but still complained that the vegetable did not grow well in sandy French soil.

The closest to German soil would be the west bank of the Rhine—Alsace. The word
Alsace
, with the root
als,
may have originally meant “land of salt.” The rock salt of Alsace does not have a high concentration of sodium chloride but has a considerable concentration of potassium chloride, known as potash, and in modern times the Alsatian habit of mining the potash for fertilizer and dumping the sodium chloride in the Rhine has become a major environmental issue.