“In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means “one who lives in hiding or under cover.” The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning “salt.” They were the salt people.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the corpse did not get a trial date and was found by a prison guard more than seven years later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“It takes two years for the salt to reach the center of a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“When these early settlers hunted, they would leave red herring along their trail because the strong smell would confuse wolves, which is the origin of the expression red herring, meaning “a false trail.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“The Egyptians of 4000 B.C. believed that the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, taught them how to grow olives. The Greeks have a similar legend. But the Hebrew word for olive, zait, is probably older than the Greek word, elaia, and is thought to refer to Said in the Nile Delta.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Pastrami, of Romanian origin, is dried, spiced, and salted beef, smoked over hardwood sawdust and then steamed. The name may come from pastra, the Romanian verb “to preserve.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“In nineteenth-century Russia, sauerkraut was valued more than caviar,”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word sterling, which meant “of assured value.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.
Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“It became a requirement of prosciutto di Parma that it be made from pigs that had been fed the whey from Parmesan cheese. Less choice parts of pigs fed on this whey qualified to be sent to the nearby town of Felino, where they were ground up and made into salami. (The word salami is derived from the Latin verb to salt.)”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Mohandas’s marriage, which was arranged when he was thirteen, lasted for the next sixty-two years. Despite his enduring reputation for living a life of simplicity and self-denial, he did not come to this easily and struggled in his youth with uncontrolled appetites, both sexual and gastronomic. In violation of his family’s religious code, he experimented with meat eating, hoping it would make him large and strong like the carnivorous English.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“The Chinese had first learned of the Roman Empire in 139 B.C., when the emperor Wudi had sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, past the deserts to seek allies to the west. Zhang Qian traveled for twelve years to what is now Turkistan and back and reported on the astounding discovery that there was a fairly advanced civilization to the west. In 104 B.C. and 102 B.C., Chinese armies reached the area, a former Greek kingdom called Sogdiana with its capital in Samarkand, where they met and defeated a force partly composed of captive Roman soldiers.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Nevertheless, Rouen merchants who sold craspoix to the English paid high tariffs at London Bridge, which suggests this salted whale blubber was a luxury product in England. This would not be the last time the food of French peasants was sold as a treat for wealthy Englishmen.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Viking is a term—thought to have its root in the old Norse vika, meaning “to go off”—for Scandinavians who left their native land to seek wealth in commerce.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, the man who had defied Louis XVI by opening the National Assembly, said, “In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Massachusetts, like Queen Elizabeth, encouraged salt making through the granting of monopolies to those who showed the skill to produce salt cheaply. The colony granted Samuel Winslow a ten-year monopoly to employ his ideas on salt producing, which is considered the first patent issued in America.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“One of the gabelle’s most irritating inventions was the sel du devoir, the salt duty. Every person in the Grande Gabelle over the age of eight was required to purchase seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of salt each year at a fixed high government price. This was far more salt than could possibly be used, unless it was for making salt fish, sausages, hams, and other salt-cured goods. But using the sel du devoir to make salted products was illegal, and, if caught, the perpetrator would be charged with the crime of faux saunage, salt fraud, which carried severe penalties. Many simple acts were grounds for a charge of faux saunage. In the Camargue, shepherds who let their flocks drink the salty pond water could be charged with avoiding the gabelle.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name—corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“The salt intake of Europeans, much of it in the form of salted fish, rose from forty grams a day per person in the sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth century.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
Mark Kurlansky
Born place: in Hartford, Connecticut, The United States
Born date December 7, 1948
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