Lots of really interesting information, but so, so, so dry. So many recipes... I don't really need to know all the different ways people first created fish sauce, maybe just tell me the important ones. Might try this one in audiobook form at a different time.

I don't get the hype on this one. I mean, it's a great idea--tracking the history of the world through salt, but there's no theory here or even interesting thoughts about HOW salt changed things. It's just a bunch of interesting tidbits about salt throughout time.

این کتاب رو هم به پیشنهاد بی پلاس علی بندری شروع کردم به خوندنش ولی خوشم نیومد
به نظرم اصلا جذابیت یک کتاب تاریخی رو نداشت

this book made me hate salt. DNF

كتاب بعد قراءته عرفت أن الملح كواحدة من أكثر السلع استعمالا بصورة يومية وواحدة من أرخص السلع في العالم، عرفت أن هذا الملح الرخيص اعتبر في فترة من فترات التاريخ عملة يتداولها الناس وعملة يتم دفع الرواتب بها، واعتبرت سلعة استراتيجية منعها عن العدو قد يتسبب في تحقيق النصر عليه في الحرب. وبسببها نشأت مدن وقام عمران في بلاد وقارات مختلفة، وبسببها قامت امبراطوريات وقامت حروب مختلفة. عجيبة جدا هذه السلعة التي يعتبر تاريخها تاريخ للبشر في سعيهم نحو المدنية والحضارة.

Yeah had to stop like 3 chapters before the end bc it turned into Israel propaganda. Odd because there was plenty of discussion on British colonialism and global slavery but didn’t even talk about the invasion and genocide of Palestine when talking about the history of salt in that area. Yuck

At first, I found the book repetitive and almost put it away. But it got better. The amount of salt trade that went on is amazing. The author also talks about the various uses - or in this case failure to use:

With no refrigeration, unsalted butter quickly becomes rancid. Even the butter sold as “sweet” was lightly salted. The English did have a specialty called May butter, which was fresh spring butter left unsalted in the sunlight for days. The sunlight would destroy the carotene, turning the butter white, and along with the pigment would go all of its vitamin A. It would become rancid and, no doubt, smell rancid. But inexplicably, in the Middle Ages May butter was considered a health food.

(Later) The English passed laws against selling rancid butter.

Interesting random info. A constant theme is the construction and destruction of salt works, to either allow or deny independence:

In time, Hellath du acquired the Anglo-Saxon name Northwich, northern saltworks. Anglo Saxons called a saltworks a wich, and any place in England where the name ends in “wich” at one time produced salt. Hellath Wenn became Nantwich, and between Nantwich and Northwich was Middlewich.

By the ninth century, the area by the mouth of the Mersey, Cheshire, had become an important salt-producing region. The commercial center was Chester, where, in the eleventh century, the Roman-built fort was the last Saxon fortress to fall to William the Conqueror, completing the Norman conquest of England. In 1070, to crush the resistance, the Normans destroyed Chester and its saltworks, and in the decades that it took Chester to rebuild, Droitwich, south of Cheshire in Worcestershire, emerged as England's leading salt producer.

Salt defines the US road network, at least in the East:

Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt.

Animals get the salt they need by finding brine springs, brackish water, rock salt, any natural salt available for licking. The licks, found throughout the continent, were often a flat area of several acres of barren, whitish brown or whitish gray earth. Deep holes, almost caves, were formed by the constant licking. The lick at the end of the road, because it had a salt supply, was a suitable place for a settlement. Villages were built at the licks. A salt lick near Lake Erie had a wide road made by buffalo, and the town started there was named Buffalo, New York.

In France, wait long enough for your day in court and you may get a reduced sentence:

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the corpse did not get a trial date and was found by a prison guard more than seven years later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial.

The state of New York gives the Onondaga Tribe 150 bushels of salt per year--a great deal for NY but not for the Onondaga:

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/0...

Of course, Gandhi's march to the sea to make salt gets a chapter. It's a good story well-told. He also covers current situation:

Gujarat and the Rann of Kutch, has become India’s major salt producer, whereas Orissa, with only six saltworks surviving into contemporary times, is no longer an important salt-producing region. Almost three-quarters of India’s salt is now produced in Gujarat. Gujaratis, with their coastal economy, are not among India’s poorest population. But the wages in the saltworks are so low that most salt workers come from more impoverished regions. Every year, in September, thousands of migrant workers arrive in Gujarat to work seven-day weeks until the salt season ends in the spring. They often earn little more than a dollar a day. Hundreds of workers are undeclared so that the salt traders can avoid paying them social benefits and circumvent laws forbidding child labor. Many of the workers are from the lowest caste and are hopelessly in debt to the salt producers. The glare of the salt in the dry-season sunlight renders many of the salt workers permanently color-blind. And they complain that when they die, their bodies cannot be properly cremated because they are impregnated with salt.

A storm that hit Gujarat in June 1998 decimated this cheap labor force, killing between 1,000 and 14,000 people, depending on whose count is believed. The price of Indian salt soared. But by the end of the year, the workforce had been replaced and the price had dropped back. Once again, salt could be purchased at a low, affordable price—-which every Indian citizen has a right to expect.

This book does exactly what it says: examines salt around the world in historical context. I have learned quite a bit about the taxation of salt invented in imperial China, and abolished as people’s dissatisfaction resulted in revolts; then invariably reinstated by the new regime as they needed money. Venice gained Mediterranian supremacy largely based on controlling the salt trade, and lost it when trade shifted to the Atlantic and cheaper British salt became available. Ghandi in India made the oppressive British salt laws the center of his campaign for freedom.

A large part of the book is dedicated to the uses of salt. We are treated to a history of salted condiments, salted fish, pickles, olives, soy sauce, etc. This is accompanied by multiple recipes, a little too many for my liking. It bogged down in the middle when there was way too much about salting fish and how salt fish was used all over Europe in people’s diets. Reminded me a bit of Moby Dick and the interminable whale parts, uses of whale, catching of whale, whale equipment, etc. Thankfully it recovered and there was more history again in the last third of the book, which is where my interest lies.

There were numerous interesting tidbits: how Morton became the biggest salt provider of the world, and how salt, once a valued property of the rich, have become the world’s cheapest commodity. The quality of salt has also done a turnaround: while throughout history the purer and more uniform the salt was, the more valuable; now when commercial salt is all uniform and white, “artisan” salts of various crystals and discolorations (mostly due to dirt) fetch a high price as more “natural”.

I was listening, and Scott Brick’s narration was good. I am not sure if I have finished it if I was reading, as the mid section felt a bit draggy, but I am glad I did.

Some interesting material buried within, but overall probably twice as long as it needed to be. I think the casual reader will get bored with this book very quickly. For those with a deeper interest in human history, it is interesting to reflect on how salt played such a crucial role in the development and success (or failure) of various civilizations, business enterprises, and human health over the centuries. Overall, the author really tries to make his subject interesting, but there is only so much you can do with a book centered on a commodity as basic as salt. 2 stars.

What follows are a few notes on the content of the book:

The book includes a lot of interesting factoids like the incredibly large number of places and things that derive their names from salt (soldier, salad, Salzburg, salary, any English settlement ending in “-wich”, etc.) and lengthy descriptions of the various methods (both ancient and modern) for producing or mass-producing salt in geographically diverse locations around the world. It also includes an excessive number of lists of the items salt makes possible (butter, soy sauce, cheese, gunpowder, caviar, etc etc) and tedious descriptions of ancient recipes that used salt or some derivative (Garum, Brine, etc).

Salt is obviously still used a great deal today, but it played a much larger role throughout history prior to widespread use of flash freezing, refrigeration, and canning. Its use in preservation of food and meat (especially salted meats and fish) and later use in the creation of gunpowder, made it an essential commodity, critical to the success and expansion of a number of civilizations from Ancient Egypt and the Chinese Dynasties to the Roman and the British Empires. It was so crucial that many countries feared dependence on “foreign salt” the way America feared dependence on “foreign oil” in the latter half of the 20th Century. Its relative abundance or lack thereof, shaped the outcome of a number of wars and crises including the American and French Revolutions, the U.S. Civil War, and Gandhi’s Indian independence movement. It was often run by state monopoly or heavily taxed to fund government and wars. Salted fish in particular generated a significant amount of global trade and became a prime source of protein for Europe (especially during frequent Holy Days that required abstention from meat).

Modern processes have resulted in consistently uniform, white crystals which historically were difficult to produce and prized above less pure salt (which was colored in various shades depending on what impurities from other substances were in it). I did find it odd that the author didn’t even mention iodized salt until nearly the end of the book, and then only in the context of the modern faddish appeal of various colored salts that were historically considered sub-par. He omits any real discussion of Iodine being such an essential element for human health and how adding it to salt was one of the most brilliant and effective public health measures in history (up there with putting fluoride in drinking water). He covers at length the rise of the Morton Salt Company near the end of the book.

Salt is sexy— really! Think about it: it’s in just about every bodily fluid (wink) and it has shaped human history like almost nothing else.

This book covers it all—from 100AD (when ancient Chinese lit up natural gas coming out of brine-water wells to pump out the brine through bamboo tubes into boiling houses to boil the water off the salt), to Venice’s saltworks, to the French Revolution (where the salt tax, known as the gabelle, was a major point of contention), to the American Revolution and Civil War, and to the salt-fueled Indian revolution led by Gandhi. It's not the best microhistory I've ever read, but it was pretty interesting to think about the humble salt's impact on human history in a way you don't usually stop to consider.

It was pretty interesting to see how Kurlansky’s interests intersect—the topic of his other books Cod and the Basques are closely related to salt, and feature heavily in one chapter of the book.

This book also contains the fun fact that “to sail the seven seas” refers not to seven separate seas, but to a place called the Seven Seas, which was between Venice and the Mainland (before the coastline changed). (Further research indicates this is one of several possible origins for the phrase, but interesting nonetheless).

And I’ve added the Polish Wieliczka salt mine to my travel list—an entire underground chapel carved from salt, and a band started almost two hundred years ago to take advantage of the mine’s acoustics, still performing today!

But the most astonishing thing, for me, is how many words, place names, and even names of entire cultures come from the word for salt. Some examples:

—salacious (salt has long been associated with lewdness).
—salary (this one is pretty well known already—Roman soldiers were paid in salt)
—soldier (the Latin “sal” became the French “solde” meaning “pay” for the same reasons as “salary”—solde became soldier, the one who is paid)
—salad (Romans salted their greens to reduce bitterness)
—salsa (Spanish word for sauce comes from Latin for salt)
—possible “Gauls” (as in, the Celtic group in France and other parts of Europe)
—the Germany city of Halle, Austrian Hallein and Hallstatt, and Spanish Galicia
—in France, a menstruating woman is said to be “en salaison” (curing in salt)
—Alsace (border of France and Germany) means “land of salt” (als, meaning land, and sel, salt)
—Selle Valley of Lorraine
—the Romance words for cheese (formaggio, fromage) comes from the wooden cheese mold used to shape and age cheese . . . in salt
—anything with the ending “wich,” which was Anglo Saxon for “saltworks.” For instance, a town in Cheshire County, England used to be known by its Celtic name, Hellath du (“black pit,” for the dark salt acquired there), which is the most Lord of the Rings name ever. But it was later renamed “Northwich”—northern saltworks.
—Because wich = saltworks, “sandwich” ultimately derives from salt.

2.5 stars

This is pretty much what the title says. It looks at how people have used salt throughout the world and throughout history – what they’ve used it for, how they’ve obtained it and made it useful to them, and more.

It was very long. Some parts were interesting, but much was kind of dry for me. I did learn a couple of interesting things, like ketchup was initially an anchovy sauce! Nothing to do with tomatoes! And places in England ending in “wich” in the name at some point had salt mines.

I think this book should have been called Salt: It's Dry. I'm about 25% through it and I'm throwing in the towel (and possibly tossing salt over my shoulder for luck). There was just nothing about the writing or the information presented that was even mildly interesting. Moving on...