Naomi Duguid - The Miracle of Salt: Recipes and Techniques to Preserve, Ferment, and Transform Your Food

Recipes and Techniques to Preserve, Ferment, and Transform Your Food

Naomi Duguid

Artisan | New York

Salt pans near Petchaburi, southern Thailand

Quechua woman walking in the salt terraces of Maras, Peru (see )

Salt is as familiar as water and the air we breathe, and its just as essential to us. Salt is our most important ingredient, the only food that we all need.

These days we are able to take salt for granted. Modern production techniques and transportation have made salt both plentiful and inexpensive. Our forebears werent so lucky: salt was scarce and often heavily taxed. Families depended on salt for preserving food (for example, large catches of fish, the cabbage harvest, the meat from the pig that was butchered in late autumn) so that they had a supply to last them through lean times. Salt was an essential tool for preserving then, and it still is.

This book celebrates salts essential role in helping us make the best use of our food by preserving it and enhancing it, so that it not only keeps well but also tastes delicious.

In the first part of the book, The Salt Larder, I take you on a journey through the realms of salt preservation, to explore techniques and foods that cooks have developed over the centuries as brilliant solutions to the twin problems of food scarcity and food oversupply. Ive included recipes for many salt-preserved foods that are easy and fun to make at home, along with descriptions and information about others that you can buy ready-made. In the second part, From Larder to Table, youll find recipes for simple dishes that make use of salt-preserved ingredients in many enticing ways.

All warm-blooded animals need salt to survive, and because salt is not distributed evenly throughout the world, humans and animals have to seek it out. Archaeological remains show evidence of salt trading and salt travel among the earliest peoples. And once humans developed agriculture and large settled communities, control of salt and trading for salt became both causes of conflict and major sources of revenue.

My research for this book transported me to many places and took me time-traveling to many other eras. The field of salt archaeology has developed over the last thirty years, generating research and papers about early peoples and salt technologies in many parts of the world (youll find some of these papers and other works listed in the Resources). Its a fascinating field.

Another resource for salt history is older cookbooks. They are a reminder of how much salt-dependent food preserving went on until relatively recently, when refrigeration became widely available. I learned so much from these books, from Dorothy Hartleys Food of England, which takes us back to nineteenth-century practices and wisdom, to William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagis groundbreaking Book of Miso and Book of Tofu; Catherine Parr Traills freshly edited and reissued 1854 cookbook for settlers in Canada, The Female Emigrants Guide; and Jane Grigsons Charcuterie, published more than fifty years ago (see the Resources for these books and more).

We walk in others footsteps. We reinvent the wheel in some ways in each generation, most often without knowing that we are doing so. In salt terms, the recent rise of interest in fermentation and in specialized artisanal salts is a good example. None of this is completely new, its just new to those of us who were not aware of the historical context. Im pleased that were retrieving and honoring long-standing knowledge and putting into practice some of the insights that our forebears gained in earlier times. I hope that this book will help home cooks and professionals alike discover that making salt-preserved foods is easy and interesting, and that salt-preserved foods of all kinds, both homemade and store-bought, can transform our cooking.

While salt occurs in various forms in numerous regions around the world, some regions have none. That unequal distribution of salt has led to trade and cultural exchange as well as to all kinds of hardship. There are salt stories almost everywhere, some of them about plenty, many about scarcity.

All salt originates in the ocean, but some of it was deposited long ago in what is now dry land. That is what we refer to as rock salt, or halite. It is found underground as solid crystals or dissolved in groundwater in the form of salt springs or salt wells.

Humans have been seeking out salt and evaporating salty water to get salt for thousands of years. Since animals seek salt too, people have long followed the cues from animals to find salty places. Whether from seawater (the oceans are on average 3.5 percent salt) or inland and/or underground sources, salt must be extracted, and that almost always requires an energy source to evaporate the water the salt is dissolved in. Over millennia, people have figured out many ingenious ways of doing so.

Along seacoasts, people learned to create shallow ponds for seawater so that the suni.e., solar energywould evaporate the water until the salt precipitated out. The most well known of these are on the Atlantic coast of France, in the Mediterranean (for example, at Trapani in Sicily and Maltas Gozo Island), and in the Rann of Khatch, but there are many more. In less sunny climates, such as those of coastal Japan or Oregon or Englands Essex County, where there is not adequate solar energy for evaporation, the seawater has to be boiled over fires powered by wood or natural gas or coal to precipitate out the salt.

Flor de sal from Maras, Peru

Inland, where there are salt wells and springs, the salty brine is pumped up to the surface and then boiled in large containers over fires. Less frequentlyfor example, on solar evaporation terraces in Maras, near Cusco, Peru, and in Aana in the Basque Countrysolar energy is used to evaporate the water from salt springs.

Inland salt is also found in the form of salt lakes or salt crusts in arid places, such as much of Utah, the Tibetan plateau, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, central Iran, and a few locations in the Sahel and Sahara in Africa. The salt from these desert-area deposits at the edges of salt lakes or in hollows where salt lakes once existed can often be extracted without special machinery; the salt is there for the taking.

There are also large deposits of salt underground in Poland, Colombia, New York State, Ontario, Pakistan, and many more places. This salt has historically been extracted with pick and shovel, as still happens in the small salt mines in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. But in most mines, machines now do the excavating. These days much extraction of underground salt deposits is by solution: Water is injected into the ground, the salt dissolves in the water, and then the brine is pumped out and filtered to remove impurities before being boiled (these days in a vacuum to make the process more efficient). The water evaporates, leaving the salt behind.