Mark Kurlansky

An entire book about salt? Is this even possible?

Mark Kurlansky pulls it off admirably in his own style, looking at human history by tracing its interaction with salt.

Salt has been a purifier, preservative, medicine, even money. Hundreds of places around the world are named for their connection to salt. Explorers made it across great oceans because of salt. Even language has been heavily impacted by salt.

This is sneakily one of the best non-fiction books ever. Kurlansky takes something we show more all overlook and makes us appreciate its role in our lives.

This is the book that started me reading History again. Well, maybe not the book, but certainly an important book.

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Author Kurlansky's famous for his microhistory [Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World], so one knows what is coming when selecting one of his books: Lists, lists, lists; lots of vocabulary lessons and smatterings of cultural anthropology. What better time, I ask in all seriousness, than the Plague Lockdown to learn vital (seriously, salt = life) information in a readable, well-researched book? In the vein of [Simon Winchester] and my doted-on [Rose George], dig into Reality show more with a learnèd guide while enjoying the process. show less

There is no way you could ever get me to eat cod, despite my partial Norwegian background where they eat a variety of disgusting fish dishes, the most famous being lutefisk, a kind of rotten, spoiled gelatinous mess. But I loved this book. Kurlansky is another John McPhee, supplying all sorts of interesting details. Turns out cod has been extremely important to civilization and almost as essential as bread. It was easy to fish and preserve and probably made discovery of North America by the show more Vikings possible. Fascinating. show less

Unfortunately this is a sad story. Kurlansky documents the relentless transition from a situation where there was more Cod than anyone knew what to do with, to a point where the fish have been pushed to the point of extinction. Ever improving technology made it easier for fewer and fewer people to harvest more and more fish. Countries subsidized fleets, provided unemployment payments in off seasons and continually extended the zones where their fisherman had exclusive rights. While the show more governments in the last century have begun to limit catches so that populations could replenish these efforts have been too late and too little.

Kurlansky shows how the picture has changed since even before the days of the Vikings. He describes not only a historical perspective but how different geographical areas were involved. Norway, Denmark, Britain, France, Spain, Iceland, Greenland, Russia, Canada, the Caribbean, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Cape Cod, Gloucester, Boston, The Great Banks, The Grand Banks, the American colonies, and of course the United States. He explains the various technologies, schooners, dinghies, trawlers, three inch nets, six inch nets, drying, salting, gillnetting, bottom crawling, sail, steam engines, diesel engines. Fishing rights led to competition and wars. Some were in various forms of denial, they'll come back, they're just migrating somewhere else just now, it's climate change, not over fishing, nature will provide a correction, etc. Others were more realistic, factories closed, fleets were mothballed, ships were scrapped, some found alternate employment opportunities, catch limits were reduced, other fish were substituted in recipes, etc. Cod figured prominently in the in/famous triangle trade. Cod was exchanged for slaves or molasses. Cod meal fed slaves cheaply and kept them alive enough to work another day.

Throughout the book Kurlansky describes the various ways Cod became food staples in various cultures and how those cultures have had to adapt to Cod being too expensive as a basic food staple. There must be at least 50 recipes in this book with small stories of where the dish featured in time and place. There are numerous well known individuals with their reference to Cod or their favorite recipes. I was not expecting quotes from Huxley, Thoreau, Kipling, W.H. Auden, Zola, Dumas, Melville, Cervantes, etc. And of course there were names from the food world, Birds Eye, Groton, and Fannie Farmer, etc. To make this even more real there were black and photos of people, places, and ships, and diagrams. show less