Salt (10 page)

Sometimes the cuisine emphasized local pride. The best pike had to be caught in the Tiber between the city bridges of Rome. But food was also a way to boast of conquest, with hams from Germania, oysters from Britannia, and sturgeon from the Black Sea. Meanwhile, plebeians ate coarse bread, cereals, a little salt fish, and olives. And the government made certain they had salt.

Roman government did not maintain a monopoly on salt sales as did the Chinese, but it did not hesitate to control salt prices when it seemed necessary. The earliest record of Roman government interference in salt prices was in 506
B.C.
, only three years before the kingdom was declared a republic. The state took over Rome’s premier source of salt, the private saltworks in Ostia, because the king regarded its prices as too high.

Both under the republic and, later, the empire, Roman government periodically subsidized the price of salt to ensure that it was easily affordable for plebeians. It was a gift, like a tax cut, that government could bestow when in need of popular support. On the eve of Emperor Augustus’s decisive naval campaign defeating Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, Augustus garnered public support by distributing free olive oil and salt.

But during the Punic Wars (264 to 146
B.C.
), a century-long struggle-to-the-death for control of the Mediterranean with the Phoenician colony of Carthage, Rome manipulated salt prices to raise money for the war. In the fashion of the Chinese emperors, the Roman government declared an artificially high price for salt and put the profits at the disposal of the military. A low price was still maintained in the city of Rome, but elsewhere a charge was added in accordance with the distance from the nearest saltwork. This salt tax system was devised by Marcus Livius, a tribune, a government official representing plebeians. Because of his salt price scheme, he became known as the
salinator
, which later became the title of the official in the treasury who was responsible for decisions about salt prices.

M
OST ITALIAN CITIES
were founded proximate to saltworks, starting with Rome in the hills behind the saltworks at the mouth of the Tiber. Those saltworks, along the northern bank, were controlled by Etruscans. In 640
B.C.
, the Romans, not wanting to be dependent on Etruscan salt, founded their own saltworks across the river in Ostia. They built a single, shallow pond to hold seawater until the sun evaporated it into salt crystals.

The first of the great Roman roads, the Via Salaria, Salt Road, was built to bring this salt not only to Rome but across the interior of the peninsula. This worked well in the Roman part of the Italian peninsula. But as Rome expanded, transporting salt longer distances by road became too costly. Not only did Rome want salt to be affordable for the people, but, more importantly as the Romans became ambitious empire builders, they needed it to be available for the army. The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word
salary
and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word
sal
became the French word
solde
, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

To the Romans, salt was a necessary part of empire building. They developed saltworks throughout their expanded world, establishing them on seashores, marshes, and brine springs throughout the Italian peninsula. By conquest they took over not only Hallstatt, Hallein, and the many Celtic works of Gaul and Britain but also the saltworks of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in North Africa, Sicily, Spain, and Portugal. They acquired Greek works and Black Sea works and ancient Middle Eastern works including the saltworks of Mount Sodom by the Dead Sea. More than sixty salt-works from the Roman Empire have been identified.

Romans boiled sea salt in pottery, which they broke after a solid salt block had formed inside. Piles of pottery shards mark many ancient Roman sea salt sites throughout the Mediterranean. The Romans also pumped seawater into single ponds for solar evaporation, as in Ostia. They mined rock salt, scraped dry lake beds like African sebkhas, boiled the brine from marshes, and burned marsh plants to extract salt from the ashes.

None of these techniques were Roman inventions. Aristotle had mentioned brine spring evaporation in the fourth century
B.C.
Hippocrates, the fifth-century-
B.C.
physician, seems to have known about solar-evaporated sea salt. He wrote,

The sun attracts the finest and lightest part of the water and carries it high up; the saltiness remains because of its thickness and weight, and in this way the salt originates.

The Roman genius was administration—not the originality of the project but the scale of the operation.

T
HE ROMANS SALTED
their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word
salad,
salted. The oldest surviving complete book of Latin prose, Cato’s second-century-
B.C.
practical guide to rural life,
De agricultura,
suggests eating cabbage this way:

If you want your cabbage chopped, washed, dried, sprinkled with salt or vinegar, there is nothing healthier.

Salt was served at the table, in a simple seashell at a plebeian’s table or in an ornate silver saltcellar at a patrician’s feast. In fact, since salt symbolized the binding of an agreement, the absence of a saltcellar on a banquet table would have been interpreted as an unfriendly act and reason for suspicion.

Cato suggested testing brine for sufficient salinity to use in pickling by seeing if an anchovy or an egg would float in it. The anchovy test has not endured, but the egg test remains the standard household technique throughout the Mediterranean. In northern Europe a floating potato is sometimes used.

Most of the salt consumed by Romans was already in their food when they bought it at the market. Salt was even added to wine in a spicy mixture called
defrutum,
which, in the absence of bottling corks, was used to preserve the wine. This may explain why their food was said to be extremely salty and yet the consumption of table salt was not remarkable. In the first century
A.D.
, Pliny estimated that the average Roman citizen consumed only 25 grams of salt a day. The modern American consumes even less if the salt content of packaged food is not included.

The Romans used a great deal of salt in the hams and other pork products that they seemed to have learned about from the Celts. Sausages—pork and other meats, preserved in salt, seasoned and stuffed in natural casings from intestines, bladders, or stomachs—were both imported from Gaul and made locally. The recipes for many of the French and Italian sausages of today date from Roman times.

Originally, hams and sausages were brought to Rome from the conquered northern empire. According to Strabo, the well-traveled first-century-
B.C.
Greek historian, the most prized ham in Rome came from the forests of Burgundy. At the time those forests were Celtic, but the French, who have a habit of claiming Celtic history—they have made Vercingetorix a French national hero—insist that ham is a French invention, albeit from Celtic Gaul. But the Romans were importing ham from numerous Celtic regions, including what is present-day Germany. The hams of Westphalia, which were dried, salted, and then smoked with unique local woods—a recipe still followed today in Westphalia—were very popular with Romans.

Cato, like many Romans, was a ham enthusiast. In fact, at a time when Romans often took family names from agriculture, Cato was called Marcus Porcius. Porky Marcus’s recipe for mothproof ham was an attempt to produce a Westphalia-type product. The addition of oil and vinegar was intended to reproduce the savage taste of the wild north.

After buying legs of pork cut off the feet. ½ peck ground Roman salt per ham. Spread the salt in the base of a vat or jar, then place a ham with the skin facing downwards. Cover completely with salt. Then place another above it and cover in the same way. Be careful not to let meat touch meat. Cover them all in the same way. When all are arranged, cover the top with salt so that no meat is seen, and level it off.

After standing in salt for five days, take all hams out with the salt. Put those that were above below, and so rearrange and replace. After a total of twelve days take out the hams, clean off all the salt and hang in the fresh air for two days. On the third day clean off with a sponge, rub all over with oil, hang in smoke for two days. On the third day take down, rub all over with a mixture of oil and vinegar and hang in the meat store. Neither moths nor worms will attack it.—
Cato,
De agricultura,
second century b.c.

O
LIVES, PRESERVED IN
salt, along with the older idea, crushed into oil, were staples of the Roman diet and a basic food of the working class. Patricians ate olives at the beginning of a meal. For plebeians, they were the meal. Cato listed his workers’ provisions as bread, olives, wine, and salt. Despite their hardness, olives must be handpicked because any bruising can be ruinous in the pickling process. Harvesting olives requires so much care that in ancient times it was believed that conditions were only auspicious for a successful harvest during the last quarter moon of each month.

The bruised or damaged fruit was cured for the workers, but the successfully gathered olives were cured in a variety of ways for sale. Apicius, the great Roman food writer, mentioned an olive called
columbades
that was cured in seawater.

The Romans preserved many vegetables in brine, sometimes with the addition of vinegar, including fennel, asparagus, and cabbage. Cato’s 2,200-year-old recipe, using repeated soakings to remove the oleuropeina, and then salt for lactic acid fermentation, is still one of the standard techniques. When he said “soaked sufficiently,” he neglected to mention that this takes days.