Very recently I have acquired a fascination with salt. This sudden interest has two sources. First, I bought a cookbook entitled Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking and have been reading through the first section, all about salt.
Second, I read an article about Maldon sea salt in a back issue of Bon Appetit magazine. (The article is available online here.) In it Nick Paumgarten explores how Maldon sea salt has become a household name.
Here are a few things I learned from Paumgarten’s article:
- Maldon Sea Salt is not just a type of salt; it comes from a specific salt works, a 135-year-old family-owned salt works at that
- Maldon is a town in southeast England where people have been harvesting salt from the marshes for thousands of years
- The Romans trapped water in clay-lined pits, then boiled it off in lead pans (Paumgarten writes, “Lead! And you thought a high-sodium diet was bad for you.”)
- Brine pits and pans along the Essex coast were even recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086
- In 1825 the abolition of a tax on salt and the advent of solution mining led to many sea-salt producers going out of business
- In Maldon some saltmakers cum coal merchants remained
- In 1882 the Maldon Sea Salt Company was christened
- The unique pyramid-shaped salt crystals that chefs around the world recommend come from this company, which has been in the same family since 1922
I hope you found that interesting. (As for Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, the whole book promises to be entertaining, educational, and practical… you might read more about on this blog in future posts.)
Remember “The Battle of Maldon” from your course in Old English? The Anglo-Saxons against the Vikings:
“Then Byrhtnoth began to array men there,
rode and gave counsel, taught warriors
how they must stand and that stead hold,
bade them their round-shields rightly hold
fast with hands, not at all frightened.”
I suppose its the same Maldon as the saltworks.
I had forgotten about that. I’m sure it’s the same place.