Eat This Newsletter 269: Salted butter
Hello
From a world in which salt is scarce to one in which butter no longer involves cows, all presented for your delectation.
“As Meat Loves Salt”
These days, salt is all too plentiful. We are admonished to consume less salt to avoid ill health. We marvel at the idea that it was once valuable enough to make up part of a Roman soldier’s salary. Salt, however, was once rare. People have argued that humans first spread along coasts because they needed the salt in sea water. Around the world, people inland have discovered that some plants contain enough sodium and potassium that their ash can be used as a source of salts, a technology that has died out in Europe.
To investigate further, Lutz Zwiebel (a possible example of nominative determinism) grew various selections of garden orach (Atriplex hortensis), some wild relatives, and some other plants in his garden in Germany and then investigated their salt content. Garden orach from Albania and Germany contained ten to forty times more sodium than all the other plants, more than any other known crop. Zwiebel then used ash from the plants to cure a fresh goat milk cheese, with very acceptable results, and to ferment fruits, vegetables and cereals, with slightly less success.
Several of the Atriplex species that are considered to be salt lovers (halophytes) in the wild did not offer much sodium or potassium when grown in the relatively lush conditions of a German garden. This suggests, first, that sequestering salts in special cells is a costly process essential only when grown in a salty environment to prevent the salts damaging other parts of the plant. When it isn’t needed, it isn’t done. But the fact that the German and Albanian strains of garden orach do indeed concentrate salts in their leaves even in a garden means that they were probably selected for that purpose, to provide the women who grew them with salt.
The paper by Lutz Zwiebel (Black Ash - a Forgotten Domestication Trait in Garden Orach (Atriplex hortensis L.) offers a fascinating glimpse into the kind of multidisciplinary detective work that goes into researching ancient foodways. I was, however, even more intrigued by an accompanying paper prompted by the first: As Dear as Salt - Indications for an Ancient Plant Ash Tradition Preserved in Old World Folktale.
Salt is a powerful thing. It ensures well-being, it cures, it pleases guests, and it attracts males. And it was brought from a mystical garden. To teach girls how to manage this power must have been an ongoing challenge for the elders.
Deep, deep dives, disentangling dozens of threads. I delighted in it all.
Feed Your Biome
If you’re sick, a course of antibiotics is usually a good thing, as long as the bug that ails you is not resistant, but there is a downside. Antibiotics can knock out the good bugs in your gut. The resulting condition, called dysbiosis, can also be the result of some chronic diseases and can open the way for dangerous pathogens to infect and colonise the disrupted gut. Faecal transplants, deliberately bringing in presumably beneficial bacteria from a healthy gut, have been tried without much success. A diet rich in diverse sorts of fibre and low in fat is actually much more effective. In mice.
It is early days, of course, and the researchers acknowledge that more work is needed — in mice and in people — before this approach can be recommended as a therapy for dysbiosis. Even before this research, though, people (hello Mum) swore by lots of live yoghurt after antibiotics. Now they can add high-fibre foods to that remedy.
Shokunin News
ABC news seems to have fallen hook line and sinker for a Japanese fish salesman’s ability to distinguish the “clean” taste of tuna caught near Japan from those caught near Canada, which boast “a certain smell”. Never mind the migratory journeys tuna undertake, it’s a lazy introduction to an article about shokunin, the Japanese word which, it explains, signifies “a dedication to perfecting a dish, even if it takes a lifetime”.
You’ve seen, I hope, the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi; the article hymns another half-dozen or so equally devoted people, including the tuna salesman who, not to be outdone, “dream[s] about tuna all year round”. If you’re visiting Tokyo, the restaurant tips might be valuable, if you can get in.
Champagne and the Surveillance State
Reading about The 1911 Champagne Riots my first thought was to wonder whether I had covered this in my two episodes on the history of champagne with Graham Harding. I hadn’t. The piece is a good account of the many factors that influenced champagne’s unstoppable rise, from phylloxera to concentration in the industry. An early government attempt to regulate champagne production in order to counteract fraud triggered the riots by classifying Aube as a second-tier region outside Champagne. Aube was eventually admitted to the select club of Champagne, but not before several of the rioters had been identified from newsreel footage.
Fat of the Land (Not)
Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of Savor, aka “We make Fats”. The website is unimaginably groovy, the pitch straightforward.
[A] process that harnesses elemental earth science to molecularly mirror fats without the land, water, and fertilizer inputs of agriculture
I suppose fats are a far simpler problem than cultured flesh, with all the structural problems that poses. And maybe there will be a market for the breakthrough, synthetic butter. The company says that the process has “net-zero emissions”. They’ve raised $33 million. So why is that synthetic butter leaving a strange taste in my mouth?
Take care
p.s. Those episodes on Champagne: Facts about Champagne: Part 1 and Part 2.
p.p.s. More salt.