Mark Bitterman - Salted: A Manifesto on the Worlds Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes

With all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt. Leviticus 2:13

Imagine that first person. Driven from the safety of her clan by the pangs of a sharp and terrible hunger, she takes the forbidden path. She pricks her ears for the sound of a panther stalking from behind, but hears only her own hushed breathing. Her bare feet slip occasionally on the moss that grows on the damp roots and fallen trees. But then she hears a soft roar aheadnot of an animal but of something else. Suddenly she emerges from the jungle shadows into the fierce open light of the seashore. She shields her eyes for a moment with her hand, allowing the bright water to take shape before her, then quickly negotiates the jagged rocks to the water, mindful of the sharp pavement of barnacles under her bare feet. At the waters edge she glances over her shoulder once again to be sure she hasnt been pursued, then plunges, her golden form rippling through the cool, clear water, then vanishing. Clouds reflecting on the surface of the water scatter into a million points of light for a moment, then ripple back into focus. All is quiet beneath the surge of the tide. Then she surfaces, swims easily to the rocky shore, and climbs out. Salivating in anticipation, she cuts a piece of abalone from its pearly dome with a shard of broken shell and is about to eat when she spies a crust of white crystals sparkling at the bottom of an evaporated pool by her side.

Her mind races.

She has tasted this stuff before, licking at the silver lacework evaporated from her own perspiration after running through the tall savanna grasses. She knows its intimacy with her body, having tasted it in the blood licked from a scraped knee. She knows it from the waters through which she just swam. She reaches over and rubs the chunk of abalone in the salt, and bites.

We were innovative foragers, opportunistic in the extreme, relentlessly tasting everything in the environment to evaluate its nutritional potential; salting was something altogether new, perhaps the first seasoning ever applied, and by definition the most potent one. The food historian Felipe Fernndez-Armesto said culture begins when the raw gets cooked because it is cooking that brings us together. But really, why would it not have started eons before the taming of fire, with that first primal cuisine, raw but wonderfully seasoned.

The first salt intentionally eaten with food would have startled the taste of even the most salt-jaded modern eater: raw seawater, rich in chlorine, sodium, magnesium, calcium, sulfur, carbon, potassium, bromine, and about seventy-five other minerals evaporated down to a dazzling white crust in the nook of a rocky tide pool. The crystals would have been flakey and brittle, dissolving instantly in an ionic explosion of bold, bitter pungency.

The first salted food may well have catalyzed the first great dietary revolutionthe shift from eating whatever could be easily found to imagining ways to make food taste better. We started to mix flavors, sandwiching different ingredients together before biting. We boiled seeds, leaves, and nuts in salt water to leach out bitterness, soaked meats in brine or rubbed them with salt to tenderize, and stoked a fire to soften fibrous roots or sinewy meat.

Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt. Pliny

If we are correct in our assumption that salting came in the early days of our existence, when we were still foraging tirelessly for food, then it was not until a few hundred thousand years after our first salted food that hunting became a major source of food. Soon we developed weapons and hunting techniques sufficient to kill rhinoceroses. Having climbed this last rung of the food chain, we were now an elite hunting species: Homo erectus. We lived in a competitive landscape, and the quest for food and territory led us into Europe, Asia, and beyond. Lacking the shaggy pelts of the northern animals we encountered there, we killed them and wore their dried hides. We invented fire and thrived like this for hundreds of thousands of years, eating a variety of nutritious plants and animal meats, adapting our behavior and diet to our surroundings. There was no place we could not go.