Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [10]
Fundamental to salt’s rich history is what happens to food when it comes into contact with salt. Most people know that salt enhances the flavor of fresh food, but fewer think about the more important fact that salt preserves food.
It’s not time that spoils meat or causes vegetables to rot, it is the bacteria and other microbes feeding on food that do, so if we salt meat or fish, if we soak vegetables in a salt solution, we can disable or kill those microbes and thus dramatically delay, or halt, their destruction of our food. Happily, and perhaps logically, this salt action not only allows us to preserve food, it can make food taste better. A baby cucumber tastes OK, I suppose, but turn it into a pickle, and it’s delicious. It goes beautifully with, say, corned beef that has likewise been brined, soaked in heavily salted and spiced water. We originally brined beef to preserve it, but it’s so tasty we continue to preserve it just for the flavor. Change that corned beef sandwich to a classic Reuben, with cheese and sauerkraut, and you add two more preserved foods to a single familiar lunch: salt and acids are added to dairy solids to help preserve milk as cheese, and sauerkraut is, of course, salted cabbage.
Cover a side of salmon in salt (and some sugar to counterbalance the harsh effects of the salt) and then a day later, wipe the salt off, slice it paper-thin, and eat it just like that—and it’s beautiful. I salt legs of duck for three days if I intend to preserve them in a confit in October to use in a February cassoulet. Salt a raw hog’s leg for a couple of weeks, then hang that leg to dry in a cool, humid cellar for months, and you are using the same technique responsible for what are arguably the world’s best hams, those uncooked marvels of Bayonne and Parma and San Daniele.
“Most methods are of great antiquity,” writes Filipe Fernandez-Armesto of preservation in his food history Near a Thousand Tables.
. . . [F]reeze drying, which most people think of as one of the most up-to-date techniques, was perfected as a way of preserving potatoes by early Andean civilizations over two thousand years ago. The technique was elaborate: overnight freezing, then trampling to squeeze out residual moisture, then sun drying repeated over several days. The durability of frozen food has been known to all Arctic peoples from time immemorial. Wind drying . . . was probably an older technique of preparation than cooking. In every documented period of the history of food, salting, fermenting, and smoking appear among recorded preserving techniques.
The Egyptians were possibly the first people to preserve food with salt on a large scale—they used it not only for their own food supply, but, more important, for trade; it helped to build their economy. (They also used salt to preserve their dead, turning cadavers into mummies.) The Egyptians reviled the pig, and so the invention of the ham was left to the Celts, who thrived in what is now Europe during the Iron Age (around 1000 b.c.). The Celts embraced the pig. They gave it to the Romans, who marched into France and England. The Romans also embraced the ham, and among their favorites was ham cured in Westphalia (now part of Germany) and smoked over local beech and juniper branches. Westphalian ham endures to this day as one of the world’s cherished hams.
The Egyptians may have been the first to take the hard, bitter fruit of an olive tree and soak it in saltwater to make that fruit not only edible, but delicious. Again, salt was the key. Salt was plentiful around the Mediterranean, and so salting meat, fish, and vegetables was common from the earliest civilizations in that region.
At the end of the first millennium, the Vikings flourished because they learned how to preserve cod, which sustained them on their journeys. But because salt was not plentiful where they lived, they preserved the fish by hanging it in the chill arid