Salt: A World History Quotes
"Those who think a fascination with salt is a bizarre obsession have simply never owned a rock like this."
"Salt has been invested with a significance far exceeding that inherent in its natural properties."
"Without both water and salt, cells could not get nourishment and would die of dehydration."
"Salt preserves. Until modern times it provided the principal way to preserve food."
"Loyalty and friendship are sealed with salt because its essence does not change."
"In Christianity, salt is associated not only with longevity and permanence but, by extension, with truth and wisdom."
"A country is never as poor as when it seems filled with riches."
"The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories."
"Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten its value."
"The Romans used a Semitic forerunner of ancient Hebrew, the earliest traces of which were found in the Sinai from 1400 B.C."
"The search for salt has challenged engineers for millennia and created some of the most bizarre, along with some of the most ingenious, machines."
"Salt was to the ancient Hebrews, and still is to modern Jews, the symbol of the eternal nature of God's covenant with Israel."
"In the ancient world, the Egyptians were leading exporters of raw foods such as wheat and lentils."
"The Romans paid homage to democracy, the rights of the common citizen and, for a time, republicanism."
"The earliest known journeys across the Sahara, in about 1000 B.C., were by oxen and then by horse-drawn chariots."
"The Egyptians mixed brine with vinegar and used it as a sauce known as oxalme, which was later used by the Romans."
"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."
"To the Egyptians, a dead body was the vessel connecting earthly life to the afterlife."
"The culminating ritual of the lengthy Egyptian funeral was known as 'the opening of the mouth.'"
"The very character by which the word salt was written depicted the state’s control of its manufacture."
"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." - Aristotle
"If you want your cabbage chopped, washed, dried, sprinkled with salt or vinegar, there is nothing healthier." - Cato
"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 Romans also pumped seawater into single ponds for solar evaporation, as in Ostia."
"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."
"The Roman genius was administration—not the originality of the project but the scale of the operation."
"FISH WAS THE centerpiece of Roman cuisine. When salted, it was also at the heart of Roman commerce."
"Physicians saw in garum all of the health benefits of salt fish contained in a bottle."
"In Vietnam salt is so appreciated that poor people sometimes make a meal of nothing more than rice and a salt blend."
"The Swedes had a wealth of herring but nothing with which to salt it."
"Herring was such a dominant fish in the medieval market that in twelfth-century Paris saltwater fish dealers were called harengères, herring sellers."
"Herring hide in ocean depths in winter, but in the spring until fall they rise and swim, sometimes thousands of miles, to their coastal spawning grounds."
"It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals."
"Unlike the fat-free cod, herring must be salted within twenty-four hours of being lifted from the sea."
"This was an almost universally agreed upon and inviolable law of herring curing."
"In 1424, the count of Holland threatened to prosecute any fishermen who cured a herring that had been out of the water for more than twenty-four hours."
"But in truth Beuckelzon’s invention ranks with Marco Polo’s discovery of pasta, or even Columbus’s discovery of America, as one of history’s more bogus tales."
"The booming medieval salt fish market was low end—lenten food for poor people."
"But despite its low standing, fortunes could be made on furnishing the poor with herring."
"These springs being remote from the sea are conceived to arise from rocks or Mines of salt under the earth." - John Collins, 1682
"Rock salt did not need fuel, but the immediate reaction of the Cheshire brine boilers was to lobby parliament for a bill banning the mining of rock salt."
"The forests of Cheshire had been chopped down to fuel furnaces. Barren white scars were etched into the pastureland."
"During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was a recurring topic of concern, especially since much of the foreign salt came from England’s principal enemy, France."
"Lowndes assured the admiralty, 'The greater the quantity is of salt made my way, the more satisfied the public will be, that my secret is truly made known.'"
"For clarifying we use nothing but the whites of eggs... our salt is as white as anything can be: neither has it any ill savour."
"The British navy was provisioned with salt and salt foods. Salt was strategic, like gunpowder, which was also made from salt."
"The arrival of the Spanish meant not only a new power controlling the salt but a huge increase in demand for industrial salt."
"Salt is the symbol of friendship, and to forget one’s salt is to forget one’s friend."
"Treaties are usually imperfect solutions, and the Treaty of Paris did not end all hostilities between the new United States and Britain."
"The protective tariffs against imported salt...were angering westerners because they raised the price of salt."
"In their view, by taxing imported salt, the government was allowing domestic producers to overcharge."
"The American monopolizers operate by the moneyed power, and with the aid of banks."
"The tax on foreign salt, by tending to diminish its importation...was the parent and handmaiden of a monopoly of salt."
"As generals from George Washington to Napoléon discovered, war without salt is a desperate situation."
"In Napoléon’s retreat from Russia, thousands died from minor wounds because the army lacked salt for disinfectants."
"The Union quickly realized that the salt shortage in the South was an important strategic advantage."
"Salt is eminently contraband, because of its use in curing meats, without which armies cannot be subsisted."
"The Union army generally had ample supplies, and its rations included salt, salt pork, occasionally bacon, and both fresh and salted beef."
"The Union navy continued to attack saltworks on the Florida coast, burning houses, blowing apart equipment."
"The truth was that too much brine was being pumped too rapidly from underneath Cheshire."
"The area around a saltworks might remain solid even though the brine it was pumping was causing the earth to collapse four miles away."
"Property owners claimed they were being robbed of the rock salt that they owned."
"The salt producers argued that the locals were already being compensated by the economic benefits of having the salt industry."
"In Cheshire, with its long tradition of individualists and small private operators, many were angered at the sight of a corporate giant buying out local salt makers."
"The Salt Union provided a target, a single entity that was clearly responsible—a defendant."
"The Compensation Act created the Cheshire Brine Subsidence Compensation Board, financed by a flat tax on salt producers."
"The Brine Board established a building code that had to be followed for new buildings to be eligible for compensation."
"British industrialists built powerful companies, such as the Salt Union, that were the forerunners of today’s multinational giants."
"The Dead Sea, with the Israeli-Jordanian border running through the center of it, seems a peaceful place, of a stark and barren beauty."
"In treating goiter, China was centuries ahead of the West."
"A fourth-century-A.D. Chinese physician, Ko Hung, prescribed an alcoholic extract from seaweed for goiter."
"Many seaweeds are rich in iodine, which is why the Japanese, who eat a great deal of seaweed, have had relatively little experience with the disease."
"In China, goiter has little history in coastal regions but has often been problematic in mountainous interior provinces."
"Among afflicted populations, iodized salt is well appreciated."
"Iodized salt has become controversial in developing countries where government control of salt is a historic issue."
"The controversy over iodized salt is in part the distrust of chemical additives that have become part of life in virtually all cultures."
"In Sichuan, wary consumers insist that iodine gives salt a peculiar taste."
"Peasants, such as the family at the little foot-operated well, do not have the knowledge or money to meet government standards for iodized salt."
"The word gourmet is pleasing to the ear, perhaps also to the eye."
"The Chinese seem ready to eat anywhere and anytime."
"The Chinese talk a great deal about the meaning of their foods."
"Food sometimes seems a Chinese obsession, and the culture at times seems almost afflicted with epicurism."
"Balance, making a complete flavor by blending opposites, is an ancient concept in cooking."
"Fill a broken-necked amphora with clean water, place in the sun. Suspend in it a strainer of ordinary salt."
"Skimming the ponds at Guérande for fleur de sel as the sun sets, paludiers can look up and see the silhouette of the Moorish stone steeple of Saint-Guénolé in Batz-sur-Mer."
"Kouing amann, the name of one of the most famous cakes of the region, is Celtic for "piece of butter.""
"It is not easy to get this much butter in a cake. The trick is a moderate oven."
"The butter is probably mixed with the salt first."
"In the past, this kind of fine, white salt was called in Celtic holen gwenn, white salt, and was rare and expensive, only for the best tables."
"Fixing the true value of salt, one of earth’s most accessible commodities, has never been easy."
"What gives the cake its buttery flavor is the saltiness."