In most of the world today, com­mon salt (sodium chlo­ride) is taken for granted; salt shak­ers sit on every home’s din­ing table and restau­rants offer it for free, some­times in con­ve­nient single-serving pack­ets. But salt has not always been so inex­pen­sive or so plen­ti­ful. Humans, like all other mam­mals, need to con­sume salt to sur­vive. Fur­ther­more, until the inven­tion of can­ning in the 19^th cen­tury, salt­ing (or the related process of pick­ling) was the pri­mary method of pre­serv­ing meat, fish, and veg­eta­bles. The abil­ity to pro­duce large amounts of pre­served food has long been a pre­req­ui­site for stag­ing extended mil­i­tary cam­paigns as well as sea voy­ages of explo­ration or con­quest. Thus, the pro­duc­tion and con­trol of salt have done much to con­trol the course of human history.

Mark Kurlan­sky details the chang­ing rela­tion­ships between peo­ple and salt around the world and through­out recorded his­tory. He dis­cusses how salt fig­ures into var­i­ous mytholo­gies and rit­u­als. He talks about meth­ods of salt pro­duc­tion rang­ing from sim­ply scrap­ing crys­tals from desert sebkhas to refin­ing the mate­r­ial with sophis­ti­cated vac­uum evap­o­ra­tors. Par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing are the his­toric recipes he weaves into his nar­ra­tive, includ­ing a bevy of salty sauces: Roman garum, the Chi­nese ances­tor of soy sauce, Tunisian char­mula, and even Louisiana Tabasco. Kurlan­sky also devotes con­sid­er­able time to the salt-related events and poli­cies that have directly shaped his­tory: dis­cov­er­ies, taxes, and monop­o­lies. Along the way he points out how many of our place names — Salzburg, Halles, Gaul, innu­mer­able –wiches — and words — salad, salary, sol­dier, salami — have roots mean­ing “salt.”

This is the sec­ond of Kurlansky’s books that I’ve read, the first being Cod, which shares some sub­ject mat­ter with Salt. He does a very good job of extract­ing excit­ing nar­ra­tives from what at first glance might seem like mun­dane top­ics. He at times seems to ram­ble a bit from one thing to another, but always in a charm­ing — rather than dis­tract­ing — way. I rec­om­mend this book highly, along­side many of the other single-word-title mate­ri­als his­to­ries that I’ve read.