Mark Kurlansky bought a lump of pink rock in Cardona, a mining town in Catalonia, and took it home to sit on a windowsill. It refused to behave like a souvenir. Rain made it sprout white crystals; rinsing it left a puddle of brine that grew square crystals in the sun; drying it in a toaster oven produced little white stalactites under the grill. The rock was nearly pure salt, and it kept proving that salt has a life of its own. That small domestic comedy opens Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, and it sets the method for everything after: start with something ordinary, then keep pulling until half the world comes with it.

First published in 2002 by Walker & Company in the US, the book became a New York Times bestseller and remains one of the best-known popular food histories.

Salt: A World History Plot Summary

There is no plot, but there is a long road. An introduction on why humans have always treated salt as sacred, sexual and protective is followed by three parts and 26 chapters. Part One runs from salt lakes in prehistoric China through Egyptian mummies, Celtic miners preserved in Alpine rock and the Roman salt road to the rivalry of Venice and Genoa. Part Two follows salted cod and herring north, then crosses to the Americas for the Revolution, the Erie Canal and the Civil War. And part Three covers the chemistry that finally explained salt, the colonial salt tax in India, the Dead Sea, modern Sichuan, and the giant companies that now dig it up for road gritting. Along the way, Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky quotes recipes from Cato to a Breton baker.

The Taxman’s Favourite Mineral

The thread that holds the book together is power. Everyone needs salt, Kurlansky points out, so whoever controls it can tax everyone, rich and poor alike. He finds the argument fully formed in China in 81 BC, when a teenage emperor staged a public debate between Confucian scholars, who thought a state monopoly on salt and iron corrupted government, and legalist ministers, who said it paid for the soldiers on the Great Wall. The debate was declared a draw, and the monopoly came and went for centuries according to how many wars needed funding.

Venice learned that trading salt paid better than making it. From 1281 its government subsidised salt landed in the city, which let its merchants undercut rivals on spices and grain; Kurlansky argues that much of the city’s famous stonework was paid for by the salt office. France built the most hated version, the gabelle, which forced every person over eight in the northern provinces to buy seven kilos of salt a year at a fixed high price. The chapter on it is grimly funny: smugglers became folk heroes, women hid salt in false bottoms, and a 1670 law ordered the corpses of suicides to be salted and put on trial.

By the time Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky reaches British India, the pattern is plain. A customs line, backed by a thorn hedge fourteen feet high, was built across the subcontinent largely to collect a salt tax that protected Cheshire producers.

A History You Can Taste

Against the politics runs a second, warmer thread: salt as the root of cuisine. Kurlansky is at his best showing how preserved food turned into the dishes people still crave. Roman garum, a fermented fish sauce made from guts, salt and sun, was costly, mocked as rotten by Seneca and loved by everyone else; its Asian cousins survive as nam pla and nuoc mam. Parma ham owes its sweetness, he explains, to pigs fed on the whey left over from Parmesan cheese, both made with salt carried up the Po.

The connections can be delightful. The English anchovy sauce of the eighteenth century borrowed its name from an Indonesian fish and soy condiment and drifted, over a century, into tomato ketchup. On Avery Island in Louisiana, a banker whose wartime salt fortune had been paid in worthless Confederate notes turned to fermenting hot peppers with the island’s own salt, and the result was Tabasco. Few readers will finish Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky without looking differently at a pickle jar.

The engineering is a pleasure too. Sichuan salt makers were drilling deep brine wells with bamboo and percussion bits by the eleventh century, and they piped the gas escaping from those wells to boil the brine, which Kurlansky calls the first known use of natural gas.

Where Salt: A World History Gives Ground

• The recipes interrupt. Dozens of historical recipes appear in full, some running a page or more. Many are charming, but they stall the argument just as it gathers speed.
• It can read as a stream of names and dates. Kings, ports, bankers and inventors arrive in quick succession, and some chapters feel like notes awaiting a thesis.
• The centre of gravity is Europe and the United States. Africa and the pre-Columbian Americas get vivid pages, but far fewer of them than Cheshire or Cape Cod.
• The health question gets little room. The sodium debate is handled in a few hedged paragraphs near the end, and the iodine material reflects how things stood in 2002.

About Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1948 and spent fifteen years as a foreign correspondent in Europe for the Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the International Herald Tribune, which explains the reporter’s habit of turning up at saltworks and asking the manager questions. Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky followed Cod and The Basque History of the World, and its Basque whalers and cod fleets overlap with both.

• Cod (1997) won the James Beard Award and became an international bestseller.
• He went on to give other everyday things the same treatment, among them Paper (2016) and Milk! (2018).
• Clarence Birdseye, who gets a walk-on here, later became the subject of a full Kurlansky biography in 2012.

Read These Next

1. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, the companion volume, with the Basque and Newfoundland chapters told at full length.
2. Dinner with King Tut by Sam Kean, for another lively tour of what ancient people ate and how we know.
3. The Golden Road by William Dalrymple, on how Indian ideas and goods travelled the ancient world, for readers who want more of the trade routes.
4. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, on the Pilgrims who, as Kurlansky notes, arrived in cod country without knowing how to fish or make salt.
5. Our list of the best books on Mahatma Gandhi, for readers who finish the India chapter wanting the full story of the man who made salt a national cause.

The Verdict

It is rare for a history this long to stay this curious. Kurlansky never forgets that salt is cheap now and was precious for nearly all of human history, and the gap between those two facts powers every chapter. The recipes slow Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and the ending wanders, but the core is generous, funny and full of things you will repeat at dinner.

The rock on his windowsill never seemed to get smaller. Neither does the subject.