Page:Principles preservation fish by salt.djvu/7



The art of preserving fish by means of salt is of great antiquity. It was practiced by the Phoenicians and Greeks and was brought to a high degree of perfection by the Romans. Mixed with spices, salt was used for the preservation of food on the shores of the Mediterranean and the outlying country in the time of Christ, reference being made in the Sermon on the Mount to a salt which has lost its savor, meaning a salt in which the spices have lost their aroma by evaporation. In the centuries following the art continued, both in the Occident and the Orient, to play an important part in world economy. Shakespeare put in the mouth of his most wonderful character, Falstaff, the words: "If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet" –a pickled gurnard, the gurnard being held in such light esteem that it was a term of contempt. Whether "sousing" or pickling made the fish doubly contemptible had better be left to the philologists to determine. Less than 25 years after Shakespeare wrote that play the Plymouth Colony landed in America and brought with 1