Salt, salt, glorious salt

For my birthday, savetheolives gave me a most wonderful book titled Salt: A world history. It is, in fact, a history of salt beginning as far back as you can possibly go with salt. (That's pretty far.) It is anthropology, geography, history, and food-ology all rolled into one. I'm only 22 pages into it (had to finish all those other books before I started a new one), but I've already learned so much that I just had to share.

And of course you all are thrilled!

It begins thus: I bought the rock in Spanish Catalonia... It is a rock of salt, pink, with an "odd translucence" and the look of a half-used bar of soap. Almost pure salt, it makes salt crystals when damp but never seems to get smaller. Those who think a facination with salt is a bizarre obsession have simply never owned a rock like this.

(I want one.)

I was amused, but not particularly surprised, that the Jungian psychologist Earnest Jones thought that the human obsession with salt was "irrational and subconsciously sexual." (He was a friend of Freud, after all!)

And then there was the whole chapter on the use of salt in mummifing those ancient Egyptians.

But this, now, amused me to no end. The ancient Chinese preserved various vegetables by immersing them in brine. Theoretically, pickling can be accomplished without salt, but the carbohydrates and proteins in the vegetables tend to putrefy too quickly too quickly to be saved by the emerging lactic acid. Without salt, yeast forms, and the fermentation process leads to alcohol rather than pickles.

And there you have it, friends. Wine and pickles. So closely related, separated only by....salt.