Salt (19 page)

Until the sixteenth-century cod boom, La Rochelle had been a minor port because it was not on a river. But suddenly, riverless La Rochelle, because it was an Atlantic port near the Ile de Ré salt-works, became the leading Newfoundland fishing port of Europe. Between Cabot’s 1497 voyage and 1550, records show that of 128 fishing expeditions from Europe to Newfoundland, more than half left from La Rochelle, with holds full of salt from Ile de Ré.

The Breton fishing ports also had a salt advantage. Salt was heavily taxed in France, but in order to bring the Celtic duchy of Brittany into the French kingdom, France had offered the peninsula an exemption from the hated
gabelle,
the French salt tax. Though the Breton ports were on the north coast of Brittany, it was only a short distance to the saltworks of Guérande, Noirmoutier, and Bourgneuf.

While northerners had the fish but could not make the salt and southerners had salt but not the cod, the Basques had neither. And yet they managed to get both. By the thirteenth century, they had parleyed their shipbuilding skills into a dependable sea salt supply. They provided the Genoese with their large, well-built ships, and Genoa, in return, gave them access to the salt-works on the island of Ibiza.

England, with its skilled and ambitious fishing fleet and its powerful navy, lacked sea salt. On the Channel coast, sea salt was produced by washing salty sand and evaporating the saltwater over a fire. This method was more costly and less productive than that utilizing the natural solar evaporation of seawater. “For certain uses such as curing fish English white salt and rock salt are not as good as Bay salt which is imported from France,” wrote William Brownrigg, a London physician, in his 1748 book,
The Art of Making Common Salt.

By “Bay salt,” he meant solar-evaporated sea salt. The Germans called it
Baysalz
. The reference is to the Bay of Bourgneuf. The coast from Guérande to Il de Ré had become so dominant in salt making that it was synonymous with solar-evaporated sea salt. There were better salts. Northern salts made from boiling peat and southern salts such as that of Setúbal were far whiter, which meant purer. French bay salt was intermittently described as gray, even black or sometimes green. But to northern Europe, it was large-grained, inexpensive, and nearby. An affluent household used bay for curing but more costly white salt for the table. Middle-class homes bought inexpensive bay salt, dissolved it back into brine, and boiled the brine over a fire until crystalized to make a finer salt for serving.
Le mèsnagier de Paris
offers such a recipe for “making white salt.”

T
HE FEW CELTIC
places that escaped Romanization are strikingly similar stretches of Atlantic coastline. The low country of southern Brittany with its mud flats in low tide and its marshes full of unexpected canals and ponds is reminiscent of South Wales. South Wales poet Dylan Thomas, describing his homeland—“ the water lidded land”—could also have been describing the area of Guérande in the center of a 100,000-acre inland sea with a small opening to the Atlantic. The tides were so powerful that one town, Escoublac, was completely washed to sea in the fourteenth century. After that the salt producers built a seventeen-mile wall separating the sea from the marshland. This wall, which prevents the flooding of 4,400 acres of salt ponds, is still maintained by the salt workers. Here, a salt worker is called a
paludier,
literally a swamp worker.

The tidal area, called the
traict,
has two canals leading to smaller channels leading to an intricate system of large and small saltworks. The paludier let water into his ponds by a series of plugs in small wooden dams. The height of the unplugged holes determined the water level. The paludier held a wooden rake with a long pole and scraped up crystals, piling them on the earthen dikes at the edge of each pond. The piles were left to dry and then hauled away by wheelbarrow. It was a demanding craft because if the clay bottom was disturbed, the salt became black.

In the evenings when a dry wind caused crystals to form on the surface of the water, the women would use long poles with a board on the end to skim the surface and bring in the fleur de sel. This was women’s work, because the fleur de sel salt was much lighter and because it was believed the work required a woman’s delicate touch, though the dainty work included carrying on their heads baskets of the light salt weighing ninety pounds.

The people of Brittany are Celts, speaking a language derived from the language of Vercingetorix. The paludiers spoke this language until the 1920s. The name Guérande comes from the Breton name Gwenn-Rann, meaning “white country.” Other village names include Poull Gwenn, meaning “white port,” and Bourc’h Baz, known in French as Le Bourg de Batz, which means “the place coming into view”—because it was on the other side of the salt marsh. Villages of curving streets, lined with one- and two-story stone houses with high-pitched roofs, grew up on the edges of the marsh.

Salt makers carved ponds out of the grassy swamp, where leggy herons and startlingly white egrets waded. It would be easy to get lost in this marsh of tall amber grass with hidden black mud-bottomed waterways. But like mariners at sea, the paludiers could get a bearing from the distant black stone church steeples, especially the Moorish tip of Saint-Guénolé in Le Bourg de Batz, the church named after the patron saint of paludiers. The 180-foot steeple was added to the fifteenth-century church in the 1600s to show navigators the entrance from the marsh to the Loire.

In 1557, 1,200 salt ships from other European ports came to Le Croisic, the rugged port by the opening of the marshy inland sea. Often the number of ships in the harbor far outnumbered the whitewashed stone houses of Le Croisic’s few streets. While La Rochelle was becoming France’s leading cod port, Le Croisic, between the salt that went out and the goods brought in to trade for salt, became the second most important French Atlantic port after Bordeaux. The British, the Dutch, and the Danish all bought French bay salt. Even the Spanish came to buy bay salt for their fisheries in northern Iberia such as La Coruña.

The Irish, starting in the Middle Ages, traded for salt at Le Croisic. They bought salt for herring, salmon, butter, leather curing, and especially beef and pork. The salt was usually shipped to Cork or Waterford. Their salted beef, the meticulously boned and salted forerunner of what today is known as Irish corned beef, was valued in Europe because it did not spoil. The French shipped it from Brest and other Breton ports to their new and fabulously profitable sugar colonies of the Caribbean—cheap, high-protein, durable slave food. This was later replaced with even cheaper New England salt cod. But the Irish corned beef still traveled far, in part because it was adopted by the British navy—competing with salt cod as a provision.

Irish corned beef became a staple in Pacific islands visited by the British navy, where it is called keg. These islands, especially those of the Hawaiian chain, were well suited for salt making. Hawaiians traditionally made salt for home use by hollowing out a rock to a bowl-like shape and leaving sea water to evaporate in it. They quickly learned to dig evaporation ponds and developed a trade provisioning British, French, and later American ships with salted food such as corned beef, which then became part of their diet as well. Richard Henry Dana, the Harvard graduate who shipped out on the American merchant fleet in the 1830s, in his account of the experience,
Two Years Before the Mast,
which became famous for exposing the appalling conditions on board ship, wrote of the terrible salt beef sailors had to eat in the Pacific. They unkindly labeled it “salt junk.”

It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name—corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals. But they did more harm to the name than the Pacific island trade, by canning it in South America. The Irish continued to make it well, and it has remained a festive dish there with cabbage for Christmas, Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day, the three leading holidays.

This 1968 recipe by the “Woman Editor” of the
Irish Times
shows the care Irish take with corned beef, and avoids confusion with the lesser English version by calling it spiced beef, which may be closer to the original name.

The following are the ingredients for spicing a six-pound joint:

3 bay leaves

1 teaspoon cloves

6 blades mace

1 level teaspoon peppercorns

1 clove garlic

1 teaspoon allspice

2 heaped tablespoons brown sugar

2 heaped teaspoons saltpeter

1 pound coarse salt

For cooking the meat you will need:

one six-pound lean boned joint of beef

three sliced carrots

a half pint Guinness

three medium sliced onions

a bunch of mixed herbs

one teaspoon each ground cloves and ground allspice

Rub all the dry ingredients together, then pound in the bay leaves and garlic. Stand the meat in a large earthenware or glass dish and rub the spicing mixture thoroughly all over it. This should be done every day for a week, taking the spicing mixture from the bottom of the dish and turning the meat twice. Then wash the meat, and tie it into a convenient shape for cooking.

Sprinkle over about one teaspoon each of mixed allspice and ground cloves, then put it into a large saucepan on a bed of the chopped vegetables. Barely cover with warm water, put the lid on and simmer gently for five hours. During the last hour add the Guinness.

It could be eaten hot or cold, but at Christmas it is usually served cold, in slices. If wanted cold, the meat should be removed from the liquid and pressed between two dishes with a weight on top.—
Theodora Fitsgibbon,
A Taste of Ireland,
1968

F
OR THE BRITISH,
salt was regarded as of strategic importance because salt cod and corned beef became the rations of the British navy. It was the same with the French. In fact, by the fourteenth century, for most of northern Europe the standard procedure to prepare for war was to obtain a large quantity of salt and start salting fish and meat. In 1345, the count of Holland prepared for his campaign against the Frisians by ordering the salting of 7,342 cod caught off the coast. Olaus Magnus, a Swedish bishop, in his 1555
A Description of the Northern Peoples,
wrote that the provisions necessary to withstand a long siege were herring, eels, bream, and cod—all salted.

The Guérande region specialized in salted fish, including hake, skate, mullet, and eel. In season, May and June, young undersized sardines, known for their delicate flavor, were eaten fresh. The rest of the year, larger sardines were layered in the local salt for twelve days, then washed in seawater and put in barrels. The barrels had holes on the bottom, and on the top was a heavy wooden beam hinged to the wall on one side and weighted with a boulder on the other. The juice was squeezed through the bottom, and every few days another layer of sardines was added until after two weeks the barrel could hold no more.

Other fish were salted, especially during Lent, including mackerel, eel, and salmon. Here is a recipe for whiting—a smaller relative of cod—and one for eel.

Let it die in the salt where you leave it whole for three days and three nights. Then blanch it in scalding water, cut it in slices, cook it in water with green onions. If you want to salt it overnight, clean and gut it. Then cut it in slices; salt by rubbing each slice well with coarse salt.—Le mèsnagier de Paris,
1393