Salt (61 page)

S
ALT CONSUMPTION IS
declining in most of the world. The average twentieth-century European consumed half as much salt as the average nineteenth-century European. But there is still a love of salt cod, herring, hams, sausages, olives, pickles, duck, and goose preserved in salt—foods that are no longer necessary. Salt cod is sometimes sold only slightly salted so that it requires less soaking, though this convenience is at the expense of quality. Some salt cod is so lightly salted that it is kept frozen, which makes little sense economically or gastronomically. Bacon and salted beef remain popular but, because they are now refrigerated, are no longer so salted that they need to be soaked before using. Since salt curing has lost its function as a way to preserve meat, the paradoxical notion of “fresh ham” has appeared. By Swedish law, a ham that is salted in September cannot be called a “fresh Christmas ham.” But a ham that is frozen in September and thawed and salted on December 17 is a “fresh Christmas ham.”

In North America, the Jewish delicatessen is a citadel of salt-preserved foods—foods that could just as easily be purchased fresh, including pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, salted and smoked salmon, carp, whitefish, and sable, and cured meats such as tongue, pastrami, and corned beef. Pastrami, of Romanian origin, is dried, spiced, and salted beef, smoked over hardwood sawdust and then steamed. The name may come from
pastra
, the Romanian verb “to preserve.” It is available in every delicatessen, but most famously as the specialty of Schwartz’s in Montreal. Schwartz’s and its pastrami is such an institution in Montreal that after the controversial 1977 Bill 101 required store names to be in French—a language that does not use apostrophes—Schwartz’s was one of the few allowed to keep its apostrophe. But it had to change from being a “Hebrew delicatessen” to a
charcuterie Hébraïque
.

While the Jews and the delicatessens are concentrated in eastern North America, much of their fish is taken from the Pacific. Great Lakes carp is becoming rarer, and an inexpensive substitute was salted and smoked sable or sablefish, a huge, deepwater Pacific fish. In the Pacific Northwest, it is known as black cod, though it is nothing like a cod and belongs to a uniquely northern Pacific family. Now that it has become fashionable in the United States and Japan to eat black cod, it is becoming rarer too and cured sable is no longer inexpensive.

Though curing salmon is an ancient tradition everywhere that the fish is found, Jews who learned of it in Germany and central Europe, where it had long been a popular food, did much to popularize it in the world. It was through the Jewish immigrant neighborhoods of Paris after World War II that cured salmon became a staple item of Paris charcuteries. In New York also, it was the early-twentieth-century central European Jews of Manhattan’s crowded Lower East Side who first established cured salmon as a New York food and then an American food.

The popular Jewish cured salmon was called
lox
, Yiddish for salmon, from the German
lachs
. Lox is salt-cured salmon, usually Pacific salmon. In the nineteenth century, the Pacific Northwest became a leading center for cured salmon for both the East and West. The booming fur trade of the region bought large quantities of salt. The merchants in the Northwest found that salted salmon sold well in the world and that the ships bringing in salt could buy salted salmon for their return cargo.

Hawaii was a salt supplier for the Northwest. Like many Pacific islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hawaii had an important trade provisioning whalers and other ships with salt and salted meats. Hawaii produced sea salt in inland lakes, the most famous of which was a volcanic crater rumored to be bottomless—evidently not true since the drained salt lake is now in Honolulu filled with high-rise buildings. Hawaiians traded salt in the Northwest and in turn bought salted salmon, a hard product that required soaking like salt cod. Hawaiians still mix soaked salt salmon with tomatoes, a dish they call
lomilomi
. The word means “massage” and refers to the process of flaking the salt fish.

Salt-cured lox, once the leading cured salmon, has in recent years been almost completely abandoned for the less salty Nova, a lighter cure, soaked in brine and then smoked. In recent decades there has been a mantra among Jewish shoppers, “Get the Nova; the lox is too salty.” The name comes from Nova Scotia, though most Nova originally came from the nearby Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec. Now there is western Nova, made from Pacific salmon, because Atlantic salmon has all but disappeared except for farmed varieties. Moe Greengrass, owner of a popular Jewish smoked fish store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side started by his father in 1929, said, “Nobody buys lox anymore—we sell 100 pounds of Nova and 5 pounds of lox per week.” Moe’s father, Barney, who had worked in fish stores on the Lower East Side before opening his West Side store, was one of those who had made lox a New York food back when New Yorkers liked their fish salty.

A
NCHOVY IS A
fish that has remained more popular salted than fresh, but because salting is no longer a necessity, it has become considerably less salty. J.-B. Reboul, the nineteenth-century Provençal chef, is credited as one of the first to use anchovies creatively, inventing anchovy patés and several pastries with anchovy fillings. He also wrote one of the great recipes of a Provençal classic: anchoïade.

After having washed seven or eight anchovies, let them soak several minutes in water to desalinate; having separated the fillets from their bones place them in a dish with several spoonfuls of olive oil, a pinch of pepper, two or three garlic cloves chopped fine, you could also add a splash of vinegar.

Cut a slice about one inch off the top of a
pain de ménage
[or
pain ordinaire
—a long, round, typical French bread]. This is the best choice of bread because it does not easily crumble.

Divide this long slice of bread into two or three pieces: they should be the same. Make one for each guest. Place some anchovy fillets on each piece and arrange the pieces in a dish.

Cut the remaining bread into small squares. Everybody dips the squares in the prepared oil and then uses the square to crush the fillets on the bread. When it is all crushed together, anchovy and sauce, you eat the squares of bread that were used for crushing while toasting the slices with crushed anchovy on top; it releases typical flavor that fills with joy all lovers of Provençal cooking and gives pleasure to many a gourmet.—
J.-B. Reboul,
La cuisinière Provençale,
1910

Another celebrated nineteenth-century Provençal chef, M. Morard, wrote, “The laziest of stomachs and the sleepiest of appetites are obviously forced to awaken at the first mouthful of this stimulating slice of bread, made golden with olive oil, awaiting crushed anchovy fillets and chopped garlic, that the culinary mosaic-maker has so perfectly placed on top.”

I
N 1905, HENRI
Matisse and André Derain went to Collioure, the little pink-and-yellow village by the sea, still famous for its anchovies. In one of the most fruitful summers in the history of art, they produced paintings of furious colors. Derain painted a village of pure primary color and Matisse a village of vibrant opposites, turquoise and orange, magenta and gold. They took their paintings to Paris’s Salon d’Automne that year and created a sensation, a movement in the art world known as fauvism.

Visit the little port of Collioure today, a few miles up the Catalan coast from the Spanish border, and these works of Matisse and Derain will seem purely imaginary. Collioure is no longer a world of brilliant colors but subtle pastel walls where wisteria blooms pale purple and magnolia pink.

What is missing are the fishing boats.

Derain painted them red and yellow, their bright red masts poking out of the harbor like an autumn grove. Matisse depicted them in a red bunch seen from his turquoise window. They were exaggerating the colors, but the fishing boats, called catalans, truly were painted in blazing primary colors. These were the boats of anchovy fishermen.

In 1770, Collioure had 800 fishermen working on 140 catalans. In 1888, the number of boats had declined by ten. The fishermen observed that anchovies will rise near the surface on a night with a full moon. Reasoning that the fish were attracted by the moon, they started making their own moons once they had electricity, and they called them
lamparos
. A lamparo was a huge light on a buoy that was some five feet high, carried out to sea hanging from a hook mounted at the bow of the boat. On a calm, moonless night, the fishermen would set their nets around the buoys and then turn on a lamparo and wait for the anchovies to gather under it. Then they would haul up a full net.

The catalans would go out every night and bring the catch in every morning for salting. The catches were good, but the more they caught, the farther out to sea fishermen had to go to find anchovies. Fishermen started using big steel-hulled ships for the longer voyage, but such vessels could not dock in Collioure because the harbor was not deep enough. By 1945, there were only twenty-six working catalans left in Collioure. Today, only one catalan sits in Collioure harbor by the medieval walls. It is an unused souvenir of the village’s anchovy industry.

Art lovers, wanting to see the town Matisse and Derain painted, flock to Collioure for the tourism season, which, like the old anchovy season, is May to September. But the colors, the fishing boats, are not there. The locals still make Banyuls from their vineyards in the winter, and in the summer, instead of fishing, there is the tourism. Two families still salt anchovies in Collioure, using salt from Aigues-Mortes. The anchovies are caught in Port Vendres, a contemporary hillside monument to industrial efficiency. It has a fleet of vessels that find the schools with sonar and an afternoon fish market that auctions the catch. But Matisse would not have painted it.