Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [7]
The first salted food may well have catalyzed the first great dietary revolution—the shift from eating whatever could be easily found to imagining ways to make food taste better. We started to mix flavors, sandwiching different ingredients together before biting. We boiled seeds, leaves, and nuts in salt water to leach out bitterness, soaked meats in brine or rubbed them with salt to tenderize, and stoked a fire to soften fibrous roots or sinewy meat.
THE NOMAD AND THE FIG
Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt. —Pliny
If we are correct in our assumption that salting came in the early days of our existence, when we were still foraging tirelessly for food, then it was not until a few hundred thousand years after our first salted food that hunting became a major source of food. Soon we developed weapons and hunting techniques sufficient to kill rhinoceroses. Having climbed this last rung of the food chain, we were now an elite hunting species: Homo erectus. We lived in a competitive landscape, and the quest for food and territory led us into Europe, Asia, and beyond. Lacking the shaggy pelts of the northern animals we encountered there, we killed them and wore their dried hides. We invented fire and thrived like this for hundreds of thousands of years, eating a variety of nutritious plants and animal meats, adapting our behavior and diet to our surroundings. There was no place we could not go.
Then one blue-white winter morning, Neanderthal man crested a frozen ridge and descended into the valley below. Neanderthals’ (Homo neanderthalensis) increased intelligence gave them the ability to think more strategically about dietary needs. Rather than eating food as they gathered it, they hunted large game, then dried, smoked, or cooked it, and transported it to a safe place for storage during times of plenty. The Neanderthals who prepared and stored foods were often as not located near readily available salt, so while there is little archeological evidence of the fact, they likely collected salt and may well have learned to preserve food with it.
Historians disagree over when and where salt curing was discovered, but there is evidence that salt preservation has been practiced since before the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, and that salt-preservation techniques developed independently in geographically remote and culturally unrelated societies.
Neanderthals ranged broadly, and would have made use of various sources of salt. Salt deposits in the hills of Austria and Poland would have supplied them with a bold but blunt-tasting rock salt for feasts of woolly mammoth flesh, root vegetables, and berries. The shores of the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, and salt springs and sea marshes across Europe and Asia would have provided seasonal access to crunchy crystals of solar evaporated sea salt to be sprinkled on deer, fish, and fruits.
After salting and cooking, the next great advance was the discovery of curing. Drying meat was likely the first method of preservation used, possibly practiced by Neanderthals as far back as 125,000 years ago, so it is conceivable that the tastier and more nutritious method of salt preserving was also not unknown to Neanderthal culture, which often subsisted on infrequent kills of large game that would have to sustain a community for several days or weeks.
Homo sapiens, our own species, appeared sometime between 150,000 and 300,000 years ago. Like our ancestors, we have very large brains, and our mouths reflect adaptations to a distinctly human diet: we have an overbite suited for cutting cooked meat rather than tearing raw meat, and a weaker jaw commensurate with our decreased need to chew tough foods. Compared