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290076a
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It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name--corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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b505c01
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The salt intake of Europeans, much of it in the form of salted fish, rose from forty grams a day per person in the sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth century.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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ab54cba
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Castiglione has 150 employees. But every March another 120 are hired to work the tonnara. The leader is known by the Arab word Raiz, and the fishermen sing an Arab song, "Cialome" (pronounced SHALOMAY), to invoke the gods for the hunt."
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Mark Kurlansky |
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610cc9e
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At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, the Hanseatics were believed to have had at their command 40,000 vessels and 300,000 men.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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bfcd409
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It is an old remark, that all arts and sciences have a mutual dependence upon each other... Thus men, very different in genius and pursuits, become mutually subservient to each other; and a very useful kind of commerce is established by which the old arts are improved, and new ones daily invented.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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095bdb7
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In 1411, the French Crown granted a patent declaring that only the cheese of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon could be called Roquefort cheese.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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1bf859d
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According to Seneca, Apicius committed suicide because, having spent one tenth of a considerable fortune on his kitchen, he realized that he could not long continue in the style he had chosen.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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8e1562b
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The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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e111651
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There is a white vein with a very small amount of liquid in it: ... Men try to catch the murex alive because it discharges its juice when it dies. They obtain the juice from the larger purple-fish by removing the shell: they crush the smaller ones together with their shell, which is the only way to make them yield their juice.... The vein already mentioned is removed, and to this, salt has to be added in the proportion of about one pint for..
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Mark Kurlansky |
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fcf6719
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Rich and poor live together in equality. The same food and similar houses are shared by all; wherefore they cannot envy each other's hearths, and so they are free from the vices that rule the world. All your emulation centers on the saltworks; instead of ploughs and scythes, you work rollers [for salt production] whence comes all your gain. Upon your industry all other products depend for, although there may be someone who does not seek gol..
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Mark Kurlansky |
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b85b9b0
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Davy's work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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f5a3111
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Venice manipulated markets by controlling production. In the late thirteenth century, wishing to raise the world market price, Venice had all saltworks in Crete destroyed and banned the local production of salt.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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250c7ad
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The name potash is derived from the process used for making potassium carbonate, cooking down water and wood ash in earthen pots.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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a472f1f
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, a French monk, Marcel Audiffren, invented the world's first electric-powered household refrigerator
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Mark Kurlansky |
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b601250
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Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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2b340f8
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The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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8ff9af4
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ONCE I STOOD on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, "We Chinese invented many things!"
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Mark Kurlansky |
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9f83304
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In 1352, Ibn Batuta, the greatest Arab-language traveler of the Middle Ages, who had journeyed overland across Africa, Europe, and Asia, reported visiting the city of Taghaza, which, he said, was entirely built of salt, including an elaborate mosque.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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f25533a
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Jamming was our ally. It made people curious about what we were hiding.
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evangelism
persecution
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Mark Kurlansky |
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aa55079
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Violence requires few ideas, but nonviolence requires imagination.
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influence
leadership
vision
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Mark Kurlansky |
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012d2ce
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When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks eaten by humans.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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a27fa6f
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Both the steamboat service to Albany and the Erie Canal were destined to be swiftly fleeting marvels, eclipsed by the next idea. Only seven years after the Seneca Chief brought whitefish to New York Harbor, the city's railroad age had begun. The
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Mark Kurlansky |
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a701cc7
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A form of entertainment that has recently become very popular, particularly in the smaller towns, is the Coca-Cola party. Usually the ladies assemble between eleven and twelve in the morning at the home of the hostess. Trays of tall iced glasses filled with Coca-Cola are passed, followed by platters of crackers and small iced cakes. The dining table is decorated like any tea-table with flowers, fruit or mints, except that there are little b..
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Mark Kurlansky |
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1f4ea89
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Both Jews and Muslims believe that salt protects against the evil eye. The Book of Ezekial mentions rubbing newborn infants with salt to protect them from evil. The practice in Europe of protecting newborns either by putting salt on their tongues or by submerging them in saltwater is thought to predate Christian baptism. In France, until the practice was abolished in 1408, children were salted until they were baptized. In parts of Europe, e..
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Mark Kurlansky |
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44778f3
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There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth.
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war
history
dreams
vision
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Mark Kurlansky |
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281dc71
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At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier."
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Mark Kurlansky |
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e8841b5
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the Egyptians learned very early that the bitter glucides unique to this fruit, now known as oleuropeina, could be removed from the fruit by soaking in water, and the fruit could be softened in brine. The salt would render it not only edible but enjoyable.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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c0b3ec1
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ONE GROUP OF Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second group remained in the Faroe Islands. The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. Soon the Vikings had vanished.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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f142295
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And another small point, or two actually; Aldus was the first to use the modern semicolon.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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7a3faf9
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No one ever escapes Gloucester. Kids go off to college and settle somewhere else. But they always come back. If Gloucester is all you know, every place else seems a little phony.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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3246a7f
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Active practitioners of nonviolence are always seen as a threat, a direct menace, to the state. The state maintains the right to kill as its exclusive and jealously guarded privilege. Nothing makes this more clear than capital punishment, which argues that killing is wrong and so the state must kill killers.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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26ef022
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Revolutions are always easier to admire from across the border.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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93d1d3a
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In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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5533332
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Writing beautifully--calligraphy--was China's first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to write beautifully, and then you painted. After mastering those twin skills, you could move on to writing poetry, but many chose to remain just calligraphers, a highly appreciated art form in China. Another
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Mark Kurlansky |
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419693e
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The Phoenicians are also credited with the first alphabet. Chinese and Egyptian languages used pictographs, drawings depicting objects or concepts. Babylonian, which became the international language in the Middle East, also
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Mark Kurlansky |
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4d2901b
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When my enemies seek my life, how can I do other than use my endeavor to destroy them in my own defense?" The"
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Mark Kurlansky |
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f30a4d4
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In fact, the first experiments in refrigeration were not with fish or meat but with everyone's favorite luxury--butter.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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a022769
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The indigenous people of five continents were facing an intractable enemy from a sixth continent that was convinced that they had the right to steal the land on other
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Mark Kurlansky |
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55d8f95
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The adversary must first be made into a demon before people will accept the war. This was why during the Cold War, the U.S. government became infuriated at any
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Mark Kurlansky |
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1c32390
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Butter has the same improbable myth of origin as cheese, that it accidentally got churned in the animal skins of central Asian nomads. Easily spoiled in sunlight, it was a northern food. The Celts and the Vikings, and their descendants, the Normans, are credited with popularizing butter in northern Europe. Southerners remained suspicious and for centuries maintained that the reason more cases of leprosy were found in the north was that nort..
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Mark Kurlansky |
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481b522
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the poor were duped into fighting to defend the privileges of the rich.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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38c34ad
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the longer wars last, the less popular they become.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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59a3b6b
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In times of war prices of the necessaries of life are generally very much increased, but the prices of labor of the poor do not usually rise.
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Mark Kurlansky |
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0300f19
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One result of the tea boycott was that Americans very quickly became coffee drinkers.
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Mark Kurlansky |