[Sca-cooks] Making Salt

[Stefan li Rous]

Sharon asked:
 > Has anyone experimented with making salt?

Not recently, but as a child I remember taking home a gallon of  
seawater and letting it evaporate.

 > Did you boil the water out or use natural evaporaton?
 > Was it hard to find clean enough sea water?

Depends upon how much salt you want to end up with. From a gallon, I  
think you just get a sprinkling of salt crystals.

That is why on a commercial scale, large, shallow ponds (salt pans)  
are used and the salt water is put in multiple times. Usually done in  
a series of pans. Once some of the water has evaporated and the brine  
is denser, it is drained to another pond and more seawater put into  
the first pond. As you progress through a series of ponds the salt  
gets more and more concentrated.

For more on period salt mining and the trading of salt see these  
files in the COMMERCE section of the Florilegium:
salt-msg          (47K)  9/ 4/04    Medieval salt production and use.
salt-comm-art     (18K)  1/ 9/97    "Salt of the Earth" by Lord Xaviar.

There are a number of books which have come out in the last few years  
on this subject. I've got several and can give you the bibliographic  
details, but some should be mentioned in the first file.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas           
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****