Salt
Mark Kurlansky's books Cod & Salt are the musts for every student on food studies. Together they supply the missing link of knowledge. One or two semesters courses are recommended for beginners in cod and salt studies.
Stats for nerds
11recommend
18mentions
16people
2011–2026years
67% recommend28% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > In thirteenth-century England, Christians were expected to avoid meat every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday during Lent (when eggs and dairy products were also forbidden), Advent and on some saints’ days (or the eves of their feasts)
Every person (back then) could observe farm animals had sex. Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin". That's why so much effort was put into catching and preserving fish.
Source:
https://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World-eboo...
Also history of food:
https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky-ebo...
The author has a fascination with Basques & Basque history. Or maybe they really had a large influence in fishing and trans-Atlantic navigation. And that maybe they discovered the huge cod banks by Newfoundland before John Cabot did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot
Medieval people were not stupid. They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months. And they observed that people who ate pickled vegetables got scurvy (vitamin C deficiency disease) at a much lower rate. The recipes didn't travel too far, so while sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage, with different spices they are wildly different.
- Would highly recommend the book "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky. I never realized how influential salt was to the course of human history.
- Mark Kurlansky has done a brisk business in this kind of biography-of-a-thing, Salt, and Cod were the first two books I thought of when I read your post, but he's also got books called Salmon and Paper that I haven't read.
I think that I would put those books under the broad heading of social histories, which is a genre. You may also look for "microhistories", and here's a list of them:
- I highly recommend the book “Cod” by Mark Kurlansky. It’s a very easy read. “Salt” by the same author is also fantastic.
- Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
- I think a lot about this Trevor Noah bit [1] with a good punchline about the historic and modern importance of spices. I’d be interested what the article means by “[de Gama’s discovery of spices on Malabar] destroyed the economies of Alexandria, Genoa and Venice“ If you liked reading this article I recommend Kurlansky’s book “Salt: A History of the World”.
