INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM FOR FOOD AND GASTRONOMY-IMFG : SALT

Salt is one of the most useful ingredients of our cooking

Salt is an essential element in the diet of humans and it is one of the most effective, natural and most widely used of all food preservatives. It has played a vital role as a product with its use in history. It served as money at various times and places, and the struggle for the supply of salt has been the reason of many wars. Salt routes crossed the globe and it is one of the most travelled materials from the south of Morocco across the Sahara up to Timbuktu. Ships bearing salt from Egypt to Greece went through the Mediterranean and the Aegean sea. Herodotus, the father of history, describes in his writing a caravan route starting from the salt oases of the Libyan dessert. Venice’s glittering wealth was attributable not so much to exotic spices but to salt, which Venetians exchanged in Constantinople for the spices of Asia. As early as the 6th century, in the sub-Sahara, Moorish merchants routinely traded salt for gold. In Abyssinia, slabs of rock salt, called ‘amôlés, became coin of the realm. Cakes of salt were also used as money in other areas of central Africa. Salt is also a good antiseptic, which is why the Roman word for these salubrious crystals (sal) is a first cousin to Salus, the goddess of health. Of all the roads that led to Rome, one of the busiest was the Via Salaria, the salt route, over which Roman soldiers marched and merchants drove oxcarts full of the precious crystals up the Tiber from the salt pans at Ostia. The word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt because the Roman Legions were sometimes paid in salt, which was quite literally worth its weight in gold. In addition the word salad literally means "salted", and comes from the ancient Roman practice of salting leaf vegetable.

Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger chemical group of salts. Salt in its natural form is a crystalline mineral. Salt is present in vast quantities in seawater, where it is the main mineral constituent and the open ocean has about a salinity of 3.5%. Salt is essential for animal life, and saltiness is one of the basic human tastes. It is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous of food seasonings. Salting was and still is the most important method of food preservation. Through history the availability of salt has been pivotal to civilization. In Britain, the suffix "-wich" in the name of a place means it was once a source of salt, as in Sandwich and Norwich. The Natron Valley was a key region that supported the Egyptian Empire to its north, because it supplied it with a kind of salt that came to be called by its name, natron. The population growth was influenced strongly by the use of salt in general. The use of salt in food as a preservative had a major effect on this. While people have used canning and artificial refrigeration to preserve food for the last hundred years or so, salt has been the best-known food preservative, especially for meat, for many thousands of years. The harvest of salt from the surface of Xiechi Lake near Yuncheng in Shanxi, China, dates back to at least 6000 BC.

Salt is present in most foods, but in naturally occurring foodstuffs such as meats, vegetables and fruit, it is present in very small quantities. It is often added to processed foods such as canned foods and especially salted foods, pickled foods, and snack foods or other convenience foods, where it functions as both a preservative and a flavoring. Dairy salt is used in the preparation of butter and cheese products. Before the advent of electrically powered refrigeration, salting was one of the main methods of food preservation. Pork meat typically contains for each portion of 100g 0.63 g while bacon contains 1,48 g, and potatoes contain 7 mg but potato crisps 1% per 100 g. The main sources of salt in the diet, apart from direct use of sodium chloride, are bread and cereal products, meat products and milk and dairy products.

The following list of pictures show all the different types of salt around the world.