Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

My review: 3/5 stars

Finally finished! The main problem I had with this book was that it was at the same time too interesting to do a speed skim, yet too slow and meandering for me to want to pick it up for fun reading.

There are lots of great novelty recipes, some hundreds of years old, for things like making salt beef or pickles by the barrel. I wasn't as interested in economic, legal, anthropological or engineering tidbits. Kurlansky obviously did a lot of research - the bibliography is 13 pages long - but did all of it need to go in the book? The sheer breadth of time and subject matter covered, plus the lack organizing principles or a central thesis, made this a hard book to stay focused on.

Thanks to Yining for the (very extended) loan!

"I bought the rock in Spanish Catalonia, in the rundown hillside mining town of Cardona. An irregular pink trapezoid with elongated, curved indentations etched on its surface by raindrops, it had an odd translucence and appeared to be a cross beween rose quartz and soap. The resemblance to soap came from the fact that it dissolved in water and its edges were worn smooth liked a used soap bar.

I paid too much for it - nearly fifteen dollars. But it was, after all, despite a rosy blush of magnesium, almost pure salt, a piece of the famous salt mountain of Cardona. The various families that had occupied the castle atop the next mountain had garnered centures of wealth from such rock.

I took it home and kept it on a windowsill. One day it got rained on, and white salt crystals started appearing on the pink. My rock was starting to look like salt, which would ruin its mystique. So I rinsed off the crystals with water. Then I spent fifteen minutes carefully patting the rock dry. By the next day it was sitting in a puddle of brine that had leached out of the rock. The sun hit the puddle of clear water. After a few hours, square white crystals began to appear in the puddle. Solar evaporation was turning brine into salt crystals.

For a while it seemed I had a magical stone that would perpetually produce brine puddles. Yet the rock never seemed to get smaller. Sometimes in dry weather it would appear to completely dry out, but on a humid day, a puddle would again appear under it. I decided I could dry out the rock by baking it in a small toaster oven. Within a half hour white stalactities were drooping from the toaster grill. I left the rock on a steel radiator cover, but the brine threatened to corrode the metal. So I transferred it to a small copper tray. A green crust formed on the bottom, and when I rubbed off the discoloration, I found the copper had been polished.

My rock lived by its own rules. When friends stopped by, I told them the rock was salt, and they would delicately lick a corner and verify that it tasted just like salt.

Those who think a fascination with salt is a bizarre obsession have simply never owned a rock like this."