Salt (27 page)

SOLONINA (SALTED BEEF)

Use a towel to rub off any blood from freshly slaughtered beef. This must be done while the carcass is still warm because the blood very quickly spoils the meat. Remove the very large bones, weight the meat, and rub it all over with salt that has been dried in the oven and mixed with saltpeter and spices. Lay out the meat on a table to cool completely. Then pack into small barrels, placing the large pieces in the middle and small half-pound pieces around the edges so as not to leave any gaps. Press the meat lightly with a pounder. Sprinkle salt, saltpeter, bay leaves, rosemary, and allspice on the bottom of the barrel and over each layer of meat as the barrel is filled. When the barrel is full, cover it with a lid, seal with tar on all sides, and keep in a [warm] room for two to three days, every day turning the barrel over, first on one end then on the other. Transfer the barrel to the cold cellar, and then turn it over twice a week. After three weeks, store the barrel on ice.

Use the following proportions of salt and spices. For one and a half poods of meat (1 pood = 36.113 U.S. pounds so this is about 54 pounds), use two and a half pounds well-dried salt, six zolotniki (1 zolotnik = about 1 U.S. teaspoon) saltpeter, and three lots (1 lot = about one half ounce or a tablespoon) each coriander, marjoram, basil, bay leaf, allspice, and black pepper. Add garlic if desired. Sprinkle a little extra salt into those barrels that will be used later.

The barrels must be small and made of oak, because when a barrel is unsealed and the meat is exposed to the air, it soon spoils. The barrels must be sealed all over, to prevent the juice from leaking.

Before salting the meat, the barrels should be soaked and disinfected.—
Elena Molokhovets,
A Gift to Young Housewives

T
HE MOST COMMON
salt-cured vegetables from Alsace to the Urals were cucumbers and cabbage—pickles and sauerkraut. The importance in central Europe of lactic fermentation of vegetables, commonly known as pickling, is best expressed by the Lithuanians, who recognize a guardian spirit of pickling named Roguszys.

In any pickling it is crucial to prevent exposure to the air, which leads to rot rather than fermentation. This is accomplished either by careful sealing, as in the beef recipe above, or by keeping the food submerged in brine by weights. Sand is used as the weight in the following recipe.

SOLENYE OGURTSY (SALTED CUCUMBERS)

Dry out very clean river sand and pass it through a fine sieve. Spread a layer of this sand, the thickness of your palm, on the bottom of a barrel. Add a layer of clean black currant leaves, dill, and horseradish cut into pieces, followed by a layer of cucumbers. Cover the cucumbers with another layer of leaves, dill, and horseradish, topped with a layer of sand. Continue in this manner until the barrel is full. The last layer over the cucumbers must be currant leaves, with sand on the very top. Prepare the brine as follows: For one pail of water, use one and a half pounds of salt. Bring to a boil, cool, and cover the cucumbers completely with the brine. Replenish the brine as it evaporates. Before any kind of salting, cucumbers must be soaked for 12–15 hours in ice water.—
Elena Molokhovets,
A Gift to Young Housewives

Copper ions could leach into the food from copper pans, brightening colors, especially the green of vegetables. It made pickles look beautiful but troubled the digestion, which has little tolerance for copper. Molokhovets gave this warning:

Purchased cucumbers are sometimes very attractive, that is, green as a result of being prepared in an untinned copper vessel, which is extremely harmful to your health. To check whether the greenness of the cucumbers is really a result of this preparation, stick a clean steel needle into a cucumber. The needle will turn a copper color in a short time if the cucumbers have been adulterated.

The amount of salt used in sauerkraut in Russia and Poland depended on the economic status of the family. Families that could afford to do so used not only salt but seasoning, such as caraway seeds, dill, and in southern Poland, cherry leaves. In Moravia apples and onions were added. The Moravians also added bread to speed up fermentation. In Poland, making sauerkraut was a community ritual every fall after the potato harvest. Women would slice the cabbage, scald it in hot water, and place it in barrels—sometimes in wood-lined ditches in the ground. Then men would pound it with clubs or by stamping their feet to prevent air bubbles, which could cause rot. Women then covered the cabbage with linen and lids weighted by heavy stones to make sure the vegetable remained completely submerged. An annual dance marked the occasion when the year’s supply of sauerkraut had been covered. But the work was not finished. The cloth had to be periodically cleaned, mold scraped off the lids, and water added to keep the cabbage submerged for two weeks before it could be stored in a cellar for the entire winter.

In Poland and Russia, sauerkraut was an ingredient to be used in other dishes. Whole cabbages would be included with the sliced ones because the whole pickled leaves were needed for
golabki
, which means “
pigeon
” but is actually cabbage stuffed with buckwheat and meat. The brine was used as a soup base. Sometimes the sauerkraut was squeezed for the juice and the cabbage pieces discarded.

The Polish national dish,
bigos
, is sauerkraut to which meat, bacon, pickled plums, and other fruits are added. The dish, a kind of Polish choucroute, was made in past centuries in a clearing in the forest. Hunters, generally aristocrats, would come to the clearing to add their game.
Pan Tadeusz,
a poem of rural life in Lithuania, today considered the Polish national poem, describes bigos.

The bigos is being cooked. No words can tell
The wonder of its color, taste, and smell.

Mere words and rhymes are jingling sounds, whose sense
No city stomach really comprehends.

For Lithuanian food and song, you ought
To have good health and country life and sport.

But bigos e’en without such sauce is good,
of vegetables curiously brewed.

The basis of it is sliced sauerkraut,
Which, as they say, just walks into the mouth;

Enclosed within a caldron, its moist breast
Lies on the choicest meat, in slices pressed.

There it is parboiled till the heat draws out
The living juices from the cauldron’s spout,
and all the air is fragrant with the smell.

—Adam Mickiewicz,
Pan Tadeusz,
1832

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Leaving of Liverpool

I
N THE LIST
of great rivers that played essential roles in the history of salt—the Yangtze, the Nile, the Tiber and the Po, the Elbe and the Danube, the Rhône and the Loire—a gurgling mud-bottomed waterway that flows for only seventy miles from the English midlands to the Irish Sea has to be included: the River Mersey.

The importance of the Mersey lay not in the goods it carried those few dozen miles into England but in what it carried from England to the world. The last three miles of the river form a sheltered, deepwater harbor, and in 1207, King John granted permission for a town to be built there, which was called Liverpool. Originally Liverpool was the port that connected Ireland with England. But in time it became England’s most important port after London. It was the port of West Indian sugar, the port of the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution port that brought iron to coal and then shipped out steel. But before any of this, it was the port of English salt, Cheshire salt, or, as it became known all over the world, Liverpool salt.

W
HEN THE ROMANS
came to England in
A.D.
43, they found the Britons making salt by pouring brine on hot charcoal and scraping off the crystals that formed. To the Romans, this was a sign of pitiful backwardness, and being the model imperialists, they taught these primitive locals the right way to make salt—by evaporating brine in earthen pots and then smashing the pots to expose white cakes of salt. The Romans started saltworks along the entire east coast. They established London in their first year in Britain, and, remembering how Ostia provided for the growth of Rome, they developed saltworks in Essex to provide for what they hoped would become a major port city on the Thames.

The Romans were drawn to the thick forest of northwestern England, probably for fuel, because the peat they had been using to evaporate brine on the coast was becoming scarce. In the northwest they found a place the locals knew by the Celtic name Hellath du, which meant “black pit.” By the time the Romans reached this area, later known as Cheshire, it had been producing salt for centuries. The earliest evidence of salt making in Cheshire, pottery fragments dated to 600
B.C.
, shows that the Britons had long known the “new” Roman technique.

The neighboring area, what is today North Wales, had silver mines. When the silver was extracted, lead remained, which the Romans used to make huge pans, some weighing more than 300 pounds, for boiling brine in Hellath du, the first pan-evaporated salt in England. The locals too learned to evaporate in lead pans, but preferred a nearby location called Hellath Wenn, white pit, and not by coincidence this produced a whiter salt.