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.
