Why Salt Was So Important Throughout History

https://bookworm.club/2018/07/salt/

by kaycebasques • 8 years ago

157 68 8 years ago

madman2890• 8 years ago

Thanks for the post. I was just in Seoul and at the Gyeongbokgung museum they had an entire section dedicated to salt, it's history, different forms, and importance. Until recently, in that expo and reading this article, I didn't realize just HOW important salt truly is.

sasaf5• 8 years ago

If you have the chance, don't forget to taste the Korean "flower salt", which is basically salt in crystal flakes, as it naturally forms during evaporation. I haven't yet found a better salt for beef.

JacobJans2• 8 years ago

My favorite salt, and relatively affordable, is Celtic Sea Salt. There are so many varieties of salt out there!

maeln• 8 years ago

Fleur de sel ("Salt flower") is also popular in Brittany.

We also use salted butter in almost all of our traditional dishes.

foozed• 8 years ago

A favourite of mine are "Maldon Sea Salt Flakes". Not sure if it is actually "fleur de sel" but it is truly delicious and available almost everywhere (for instance through amazon...)

KozmoNau72• 8 years ago

Doesn't have to be Korean, most countries with any coast line make good flaky sea salt.

Here in Denmark, we make it on the island of Læsø, where the geography helps concentrate the sea water before it is used to make sea salt.

That's the fancy expensive stuff. I use flaky sea salt from 2kg buckets I buy at a restaurant supply store. Much less expensive, works just as well.

a3n• 8 years ago

Day to day importance of salt in history is preserved in language.

"Worth his salt."

Salary.

jlebrech2• 8 years ago

it's also important for encoding passwords.

baud147258• 8 years ago

And in online conversations, spread all over the discussion threads

jlebrech2• 8 years ago

i should have guessed it, HN has no humor

al_ramich• 8 years ago

Pretty fascinating to see all the applications of Salt. You would think that the food industry is the largest application but not quite https://eusalt.com/sites/default/files/page-documents/Salt%2...

kaycebasques10• 8 years ago

Thank you. Kurlansky goes into some of the applications of salt in the book. I was thinking about adding a section to this article on how salt drove technological innovation, but couldn't quite capture all the different events coherently.

basch• 8 years ago

Salt does other things to food besides alter taste and preserve.

"Salt is special. See, rather than simply flavoring meat by working itself in between muscle fibers, it actually alters the structure of meat, primarily by causing certain parts of the protein myosin to become dissolvable in water.

What does this accomplish? Well, by dissolving myosin, muscle structure is greatly loosened, allowing it to retain more moisture (this is the principle behind brining), and more importantly in this case, it allows proteins between muscle groups to cross-link, causing them to stick to each other.

This is why, for instance, sausages get a nice bouncy, snappy texture, and why if you remove the salt from one, it becomes crumbly and dry (see here for more info on salting and making sausages, and here for some deeper scientific info on the process of salting meat. http://qpc.adm.slu.se/Low_salt_pig-meat_products/page_23.htm...

https://www.seriouseats.com/2013/05/food-lab-tacos-al-pastor... (and a variant I like even more https://www.seriouseats.com/2016/02/how-to-make-mexican-pueb...)

The same idea works with steak, but you need to be careful if you are anywhere between immediately salting the steak, and less than an hour. (scroll to the Salt section) https://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/the-food-lab-more-tips-f...

cup-of-tea6• 8 years ago

if you remove the salt from one, it becomes crumbly and dry

If you remove the salt it is not a sausage. The word sausage comes from Latin salsus meaning "salted". Salad and sauce also come from this root (more obviously in the Spanish salsa).

coldtea• 8 years ago

Etymology doesn't dictate use, it only influences it.

People will still call unsalted sausages (e.g. for people that must follow a salt-free diet ) sausages, even if 2000+ years ago salsus meant "salted" for a totally different nation of people.

Heck, even vegan products are called sausages, without having any meat even.

lgessler3• 8 years ago

If you showed a tube of ground meat to some people and asked if it looked like a sausage, most would agree it does without insisting that you check to see if it has salt. While you're right about the word's etymological history[1], there is nothing that prevents words from obtaining new meanings that might seem like they're at odds with their etymological histories. A good example of this: nice[2].

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/sausage

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/nice

kaycebasques10• 8 years ago

Salary is another word that has its roots in salt. It harkens back to Ancient Rome, when soldiers got paid in salt.

mfoy_• 8 years ago

GP was saying _if_ you removed the salt from what was previously a sausage, it would crumble.

kbutler2• 8 years ago

... Latin salsus meaning "salted". Salad and sauce also come from this root

... so if you remove the salt, it's not a salad or a sauce? Hmm.

philipodonnell• 8 years ago

I think most people would consider any ground meat in a smallish cylinder shape to be "sausage", especially if wrapped in a natural or synthetic sheath.

Salt might be what makes a "good" sausage?

wallflower• 8 years ago

I highly recommend Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat" if you are interested in the fundamental basics of cooking like salt.

This beautiful, approachable book not only teaches you how to cook, but captures how it should feel to cook
"Just reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will make you a better cook, adept at seasoning, balancing..."

https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/523923/

vfc1• 8 years ago

With the advent of refrigeration, we need salt less than ever. The problem is that brands have used it to gain a comercial advantage, to the point where if we eat some processed food and dont add any extra salt, we are already exceeding the daily recommended limit.

The link between salt and hypertension is well known by the general public, but less well know is that salt is a major cause of stomach cancer.

There is just so much salt hidden in everyday food, that we are not even aware of.

Yet, its possible to do a very salty tasting soup just by using carrot juice or celery as the base instead of water, as those vegetables are relatively high in sodium.

You taste it and could swear that the soup was salted, when there is no added salt.

kaycebasques10• 8 years ago

I always thought that refrigeration was the nail in the coffin for demand for salt as a preservative, but the book mentioned in the article points out that it started with canned food. I never appreciated how innovative that approach must have been at the time. Stick the food in a sealed can and then heat it up. Although, apparently Ancient Romans and Chinese had used that technique, but for some reason it lost popularity until its rediscovery in the 19th century.

ghein2• 8 years ago

Salt to hypertension thesis has been hit with a number of problems recently. As have many other "known" results in dietary and epidemiological studies.

Current research suggests that while salt is bad for people WITH hypertension the causal link between elevated consumption and hypertension isn't what was earlier believed. One study here https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317099.php

elboru• 8 years ago

I reached a point where I don't know what to believe, everything cures and causes cancer at the same time, every week I'll ran into an article about a new study contradicting some random common knowledge.

I guess the key is to live a balanced life, don't consume anything in excess and don't worry too much. "In medium virtus est"

rhinoceraptor• 8 years ago

The link between salt and hypertension

This idea is not supported by the evidence.

menacingly2• 8 years ago

I'm usually a fan of our "of general intellectual interest" type articles, but this one doesn't quite justify its existence.

It's not very satisfying to read a list of the things you'd roughly guess from reading the headline.

rebuilder• 8 years ago

The article is just a host for affiliate links.

kaycebasques10• 8 years ago

I wrote the article. Yes, I'm trying to use affiliate links to make this passion project more sustainable in the long term, but I'm definitely not just cranking out content for the sake of sales. I'm actually quite discouraged at the moment because I can't get any traffic to the affiliate. I'm 90 days in and my account will be canceled if I don't get 3 sales by 180 days.

My general strategy is to write about books that I happen to be reading anyway. I'm finding that it's a great way to deepen my knowledge retention of the books that I read. It took me about 5 to 7 hours to synthesize the contents of the book into these main themes. If you read the book you'll find that it's organized very differently from the themes that I've identified.

So, sorry if it's coming off as garbage affiliate content just created for the sake of sales. Definitely not my intention.

briandear• 8 years ago

You read the article. Hopefully you’ll send over a micropayment to support the author. Otherwise, how are content creators supposed to keep creating content? I found the article interesting despite not having an interest in buying a book. It wasn’t trying to “sell” me anything or get me to sign up for anything. It was an unobtrusive experience. Do we criticize news articles because they are tracking our every move or dismiss news articles as just a host for tracking and advertising? That’s what journalism and broadcasting is— the writers and producers trade content in exchange for you seeing an advertisement.

I appreciate the author’s work and, if I were in the market for a book about the history of salt, I would have been glad to click his link. I am sure the more financially blessed among us would love to live in a world that wasn’t so gauche as to require people actually making money from their work, but that isn’t reality. Not everyone has the privilege of just giving away work for free. The funny thing is that if the author had a paywall, people would complain about that. I don’t understand the resistance to people trying to make money with content, especially when done in an unobtrusive way.

kaycebasques10• 8 years ago

What would make it worth your time?

menacingly2• 8 years ago

Oh, I don't think it's a bad article, I think it's a bad article/audience fit for HN. In my mind, the reader here maintains a pretty high bar for interesting, since I think of it as a curious, exploratory bunch who have already scratched the surface on a wide array of topics.

chobeat• 8 years ago

I'm reading that book right now. It's very well written and light considering the many complex subjects that it covers.

giardini• 8 years ago

Wish we had used Kurlansky's book for European history: I now have some understanding of the Hanseatic League's origin! Who could have believed a book titled "Salt" could be so enlightening and fascinating:

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky https://amzn.to/2L2DO4N

While this this sounds pedantic (who besides me would get excited about a good explanation the origins of "the Hanseatic League"?) but Kurlansky really makes it fascinatingly rich reading.

attaboyjon• 8 years ago

The book 'Cod' by same author is also a really good, if not better book. I'm always impressed when someone can make a good story out of a seemingly boring topic.

http://a.co/0tknqbI

dghughes• 8 years ago

Other uses of salt are in coffee, with tequila and salad. Salt reduces any of the bitterness in those things. It's why a salad is called a salad since the Romans salted the bitter greens they ate to reduce the bitterness.

Why Salt Was So Important Throughout History

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