Salt (46 page)

It turned out that salt was a microcosm for one of the oldest concepts of nature and the order of the universe. From the fourth-century-
B.C.
Chinese belief in the forces of yin and yang, to most of the world’s religions, to modern science, to the basic principles of cooking, there has always been a belief that two opposing forces find completion—one recieving a missing part and the other shedding an extra one. A salt is a small but perfect thing.

M
UCH OF THE
new interest in salt, like the early Chinese experiments with saltpeter, was focused on providing the military with ever more efficient ways to blow up people and things. In the nineteenth century, it was discovered that potassium chlorate produced a bigger explosion than traditional gunpowder, potassium nitrate. And magnesium had even more impressive explosive properties.

This science gave birth to a broad range of industries, some of which also poisoned people. The Leblanc process, invented by eighteenth-century French surgeon Nicolas Leblanc, treated salt with sulfuric acid to produce sodium carbonate. Along the way, it also gave off hydrogen chloride fumes and solid calcium sulphide. The calcium sulphide released the classic “rotten egg” smell of sulfur to add to the black clouds and cinder of industrial centers. Hydrogen chloride fumes were worse.

The gas from these manufactories is of such a deleterious nature as to blight anything within its influence, and is alike baneful to health and property. The herbage in the fields in their vicinity is scorched, the gardens yield neither fruit nor vegetables; many flourishing trees have lately become rotten naked sticks. Cattle and poultry droop and pine away. It tarnishes the furniture in our houses, and when we are exposed to it, which is of frequent occurrence, we are afflicted with coughs and pains in the head.—
hearings at the town council of Newcastle upon Tyne, January 9, 1839

Saltworks, once contaminated by coal smoke and pan scale, expanded their line of products and became far more toxic. By the 1880s, the age of canals had come to an end with the development of railroads, and salt was no longer profitable in upstate New York. But salt was used to manufacture soda ash, caustic soda, bicarbonate of soda, and other chemicals. The salt center of Syracuse was turned into a chemical manufacturing center, temporarily saving the industry but nearly destroying Lake Onondaga with pollution. Chlorine is a component of some of the deadliest industrial pollutants, including polychlorinated biphenyls, which are more infamously known by their abbreviation, PCBs.

On May 15, 1918, the section of the Erie Canal that ran through Syracuse was closed. Five years later, the city bought the canal property for $800,000 and covered it over, creating Erie Boulevard. Soon even the salt industry vanished. In the 1930s, the saltworks were cleared away, and the city struggled to clean up the lake so that the area could be used for recreation.

The canals of downtown Syracuse, New York.
Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Mythology of Geology

C
HEMISTRY CHANGED FOREVER
the way we see salt. But it was inventions in other fields that radically changed the role of salt in the world.

Salt for food will never become completely obsolete. But since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it has steadily become less important.

The first blow was from a Paris cook named Nicolas Appert. Considering the significance of his invention, little is known of Appert. Some think his first name may have been François. He was a confectioner who believed that sealing food tightly in a jar and then heating the jar would destroy the substance that caused food to rot, a substance that he termed
ferment.

Among the first salt fish customers to be lost to Appert’s ideas was Napoleon’s navy. In 1803, Appert persuaded the navy to try his broth, beef, and vegetables all preserved in glass jars by his heating and sealing process. The navy was pleased. A report stated, “The beans and green peas, both with and without meat, have all the freshness and flavor of hand-picked vegetables.”

Anyone who has ever eaten canned beans or peas may suspect some hyperbole here, but for sailors who had never had vegetables on their long voyages, Appert’s treats seemed a wondrous invention. Grimod de La Reynière, the leading gastronomic writer of France at the time, praised Appert’s food.

Appert’s 1809 book,
The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years
, was widely read and even translated into English. Only months after its publication, Peter Durand, a Londoner, was granted a patent for preserving food. He admitted that his ideas came from an unnamed foreigner, who was probably Appert. Actually, in 1807, an Englishman named Thomas Saddington had demonstrated a similar process. But what is important about Durand is that along with glass and pottery, he mentioned in his list of possible containers for preserved foods “tin and other metals.”

Bryan Donkin, a visionary early British industrialist, realized, perhaps better than Durand had, the potential of the tin idea. He had founded the Dartford Iron Works, and, in 1805, he helped finance the first industrial papermaking machine. After Durand received his patent in 1809, Donkin founded Donkin, Hall, and Gamble, the first British canning plant, across the Thames from the City of London. It became the outfitter of famous expeditions such as the arctic expeditions of William Edward Parry in the 1820s.

Toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British navy began experimenting with canned food from Donkin, Hall, and Gamble. At first, canned food was used as special provisions for those on sick list, but by the 1830s, it had become part of general provisions. Unfortunately, the can opener had not yet been invented. Sailors were issued special knives with which to pry open the cans.

In 1830, a canning plant was built in La Turballe, the sardine fishing town across the opening of the Guérande swamp from Le Croisic. The plant flourished, and gradually most of the area’s salt fish business collapsed, unable to compete with canned products. In time, much of the French Atlantic salt fish industry disappeared. A similar fate befell much of the salted herring industry to the north and anchovy industry to the south.

A
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
invention dealt an even worse blow to the salt fish industry and, for that matter, to fish. The idea of using cold to preserve food had been much thought about in the nineteenth century. In 1800, Thomas Moore, an American engineer who wanted to keep his butter cool during the twenty-mile journey between his Maryland farm and the market in Washington, D.C., the newly created capital, built a wooden box with a metal butter container inside surrounded by ice. He then stuffed the box with rabbit fur. According to his account, his butter, firm and chilled even in summer, sold well in Washington.

As early as the 1820s, fish was sometimes packed in ice in an attempt to preserve its freshness. American farmers asked themselves if ice could not somehow be used like salt. “Salting in snow” was discussed by Sarah Josepha Hale. As the editor of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
from 1837 to 1877—years in which this widely read magazine almost never mentioned the Civil War because war was not the business of ladies—Hale was regarded as one of America’s most influential women.

An excellent way to keep fresh meat during the winter, is practiced by the farmers in the country, which they term “salting in snow.” Take a large clean tub, cover the bottom three or four inches thick with clean snow; then lay pieces of fresh meat, spare ribs, fowls, or whatever you wish to keep, and cover each layer with two or three inches of snow, taking particular care to fill snow into every cranny and crevice between the pieces, and around the edges of the tub. Fowl must also be filled inside with the snow. When the tub is filled, the last layer must be snow, pressed down tight; then cover the tub, which must be kept in a cold place, the colder the better. The meat will not freeze, and unless there happen to be a long spell of warm weather, the snow will not thaw, but the meat remain as fresh and juicy when it is taken out to be cooked, as when it was first killed.—
Sarah Josepha Hale,
The Good Housekeeper,
1841

An eccentric New Yorker named Clarence Birdseye was troubled by the idea of packing food in ice, because the ice melted and the resulting water created an environment in which bacteria could flourish. Bored with New York office jobs, Birdseye had moved to Labrador with his wife, Eleanor, and their son to earn his living trapping furs. He noted, as was long known by the indigenous people there, that when fish are caught in Labrador in the wintertime, they instantly freeze, and that if kept this way for several weeks, when thawed they will taste fresh.

The Birdseye home became very different from other Labrador households. Cabbages were frozen in the windows, and fish were swimming in the bathtub, as Birdseye experimented. He observed how the harsh Labrador wind acted on wet food, freezing it very rapidly so that bacteria had no opportunity to develop. Soon he was in Washington, unveiling his new technology, the fast-freezing process. Birdseye went to the unveiling equipped with a block of ice, a fan, and a bucket of brine—all the necessary ingredients for a homemade Labrador winter. He made the brine from calcium chloride, which, after experimentation, he found kept the temperature lower than sodium chloride.

Fast freezing worked, Birdseye discovered, because of a principle every salt maker knew: Rapid crystallization creates small crystals, and slow crystallization produces large ones. Because the ice crystals in rapidly frozen food were small, they did not interfere with the tissue structure and so better preserved the food in its original state.