The Romans Were Using Salt for Many Things, Including Food and for Dyeing

SALT

There is a French folk tale about a princess who is forced to leave the country by her father because she says to him ‘I love you like salt.’ Only later when he is not allowed salt does he realise how important it is and so how much his daughter loved him.

The Romans were using salt for many things, including food and for dyeing.

Most of the salt eaten by Romans was already in the food when they bought it at market. They used a great deal of salt in ham and other pork dishes that they loved. Sausages, preserved in salt, were brought over from Gaul (France). The Celtswere also fond of pig meat or wild boar. The leg of the wild boar was thought to be the best bit – just look at Asterix and Obelix!

Another favourite Roman food was fish sauce. There were four types of fish sauce - the two most popular being garum and liquamen, which were used by the Romans like we use salt, or soy sauce for Chinese food. To make the sauce, fish scraps were put in jars with layers of salt and then weighted on top to keep them submerged in the pickle that developed as the salt drew the moisture out of the fish.

The second use for salt was for dyeing process.

Purple dye needed salt. The dye was produced by salting and soaking a shellfish from the Mediterraneancalled a murex, which looks like a whelk, only smaller. It was so difficult and took such a long time to make that the colour purple was a luxury and was a way of showing how rich you were. Julius Caesar made a law that only he and his household could wear purple trimmed togas. The colour purple became known as Royal Purple, and there is a shade of purple today that still has that name.

The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times the soldiers were even paid in salt. The Latin for salt is sal,which is where the word salary comes from and the expression ‘worth his salt’ or ‘earning his salt’.

The word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word soldier.

In the Middle Ages, salt already had a wide number of uses apart from preserving food. It was used to cure leather, to clean chimneys, to solder pipes, to glaze pottery and as a medicine for a wide variety of complaints from toothaches, to upset stomachs, to ‘heaviness of mind’. But the development of the salt cod industry after Cabot’s voyage increased the need for sea salt, which was believed to be the only salt suitable for curing fish.

Lisbon, in Portugal, was built on a large inlet with a small opening and Aviero further up on the marshy shores of the inlet, was an ideal salt-making location. It had been the leading source of salt from the 10th century, but with the growing demand, the salt works of Setubal just south of the capital became the leading supplier. Setubal’s salt earned a reputation throughout Europe for the dryness and whiteness of its crystals. It was said to be the perfect salt for curing fish or cheese.

England lacked sea salt. Poole and other areas on the channel coast, sea salt was produced by washing salty sand and evaporating the water over a fire. This method was expensive and didn’t make as much salt as the natural solar evaporation of seawater.

“For certain uses such as curing fish English white salt and rock salt are not as good as Bay salt which is imported from France” William Brownrigg, 1748 The Art of Making Common Salt.

Bay salt is solar evaporated salt. In 1557 1,200 ships visited Le Croisic to buy Bay salt, including the ships from Waterford and Cork who supplied the Dorset fishermen with their salt on the way to Newfoundland.

The modern salt industry gives at least 14,000 uses for salt, including the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, fertilising fields, making soap, softening water, dying textiles and of course in food.

Once I was water, full of scaly fish,

My nature changed, by changed decree of fate,

I suffered torments torrid by the flames,

My face now shines like whitest ash or snow.

Viking riddle

Reference: Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society Volume 127, 2005,

‘Of Salt and the DorsetCoast at Lyme’ by Katherine Barker.