Above the salt

In the Vespers series, lovely Renata is the daughter of a salt merchant from Trapani. See what our friends at Medievalists.net have to say about salt.

Using Salt in the Middle Ages By Danièle Cybulski

Salt was an integral part of medieval life: not only is some salt a necessary part of a human diet, but it’s also essential for preserving food such as meat, seafood, and dairy products in the absence of refrigeration. Though salt wasn’t always cheap or easy for everyone to get their hands on, it was ever present in the medieval world. The amount of salt needed varied from place to place, and from purpose to purpose. Naturally, salting food for long-term storage took more salt than that used for everyday cooking. In Food and Feast in Medieval England, P.W. Hammond writes, “In the thirteenth century the Bishop of Winchester kept 160 quarters (1,310 liters) at one of his manors.”

For an island nation like Sicily, salt wasn’t too hard to come by. Salt pans in Trapani and other coastal cities were valuable and attracted the attention of the wealthiest landowners. Given the large quantities of salt needed for curing and eating, salt production would have been lucrative, indeed. Medieval salt was collected from the evaporation of natural salty springs or seawater. None of it was mined. Since this process would involve getting some dirt in the salt, it was frequently purified by merchants before sale, or by households before use, by redissolving, filtering and evaporating it again. Naturally, the closer to the table, the better the salt: no one wanted dirt in the salt dish, but a little dirt in a pickle barrel wasn’t as big a deal. Unethical salt merchants could – and did – add bulk to their product by deliberately mixing in sand. Because not everyone found salt easy to come by, it was used as a marker of social status. Important people sat “above the salt”, with easy access to the salt cellar at feasts, while unimportant people sat below the salt.