Salt

Read Salt for Free Online Page A

Book: Read Salt for Free Online
Authors: Mark Kurlansky
Tags: Ebook, book
leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs. They tried to domesticate for meat the hyenas that scavenged the edge of villages looking for scraps and dead animals to eat, but most Egyptians were revolted by the idea of eating such an animal. Other failed Egyptian attempts at animal husbandry include antelope, gazelle, oryx, and ibex. In the northern Sinai and what is now the southern Israeli Negev Desert, the remnants of pens for such fauna, the remains of these failed experiments, have been found. But the Egyptians did succeed in domesticating fowl—ducks, geese, quail, pigeon, and pelican. Ancient walls show fowl being splayed, salted, and put into large earthen jars.
A great source of Egyptian food was the wetlands of the Nile, the reedy marshes where fowl could be found, as well as fish such as carp, eel, mullet, perch, and tigerfish. The Egyptians salted much of this fish. They also dried, salted, and pressed the eggs of mullet, creating another of the great Mediterranean foods known in Italian as bottarga .
The Egyptians lay claim to another pivotal food invention: making the fruit of the olive tree edible. Almost every Mediterranean culture claims olives as its discovery. 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. It may have been Syrians or Cretans who first bred the Olea europaea from the pathetic, scraggly, wild oleaster tree. The Egyptians were not great olive oil producers and imported most of their olive oil from the Middle East. The fresh-picked fruit of the olive tree is so hard and bitter, so unappealing, that it is a wonder anyone experimented long enough to find a way to make it edible. But the Egyptians learned very early that the bitter glucides unique to this fruit, now known as oleuropeina, could be removed from the fruit by soaking in water, and the fruit could be softened in brine. The salt would render it not only edible but enjoyable.
Making olives and making olive oil are at cross purposes, since a good eating olive is low in oil content. It may be that this was characteristic of Egyptian olives. These eating olives were included in the food caches of ancient Egyptian tombs.
The Egyptians were the inventors of raised bread. To make leavened bread, a gluten-producing grain, not barley or millet, was necessary, and about 3000 B.C. the Egyptians developed wheat that could be ground and stretched into a dough capable of entrapping carbon dioxide from yeast. The starting yeast was often leftover fermented dough, sour dough, which is another example of lactic acid fermentation. Egyptian bakers created an enormous variety of breads in different shapes, sometimes with the addition of honey or milk or eggs. Most of these doughs, as with modern breads, were made from a base of flour, water, and a pinch of salt.
In 1250 B.C. , when Moses liberated the Hebrew slaves, leading them out of Egypt across the Sinai, the Hebrews took with them only flat unleavened bread, matzo, which is described by the Hebrew phrase lechem oni, meaning “bread of the poor.” Poor Egyptians did not have the sumptuous assortment of Egyptian raised bread but, like people outside of Egypt, ate flat bread known as ta, which sometimes had coarse grain, even chaff, in it and lacked the luxury of “a pinch of salt.” According to Jewish legend, the fleeing Hebrews took unleavened bread because they lacked time to let the bread rise. But it may also have been what they were used to making, or perhaps it was a conscious rejection of Egyptian culture and the luxuries of the slave owners. Raised bread and salt curing were emblematic of the high-living Egyptians.

T HE EGYPTIANS MADE salt by evaporating seawater in the Nile

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