History & folklore

Salt and Preserving: From Roman Fish Sauce to Corned Beef

By The Salt AlmanacPublished November 8, 2026

Before refrigerators, salt kept food from spoiling. Old cookbooks and household guides show how families salted pigs, fish and beef, and why “corned” beef has nothing to do with corn.

Why salt preserves food

Bacteria and moulds need water. Salt draws water out of food and makes what remains too salty for most of them to grow. Pliny put it simply nearly 2,000 years ago: salt “preserves the dead from putrefaction.” Victorian cooks noticed the side effects too. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management explains that salt shrinks meat as it draws out moisture, and that a little saltpetre keeps cured meat red, though it also makes it harder.

Rome's fish sauce

The Romans salted fish guts and scraps and left them to ferment into garum, their all-purpose sauce. Pliny says the best kind, from Carthago Spartaria in Spain, cost nearly 1,000 sesterces for two congii, about six and a half litres, more than almost any liquid except perfume. Mrs Beeton was still describing how the ancients made mackerel garum in the 1800s: fish, lots of salt, months in the sun, then old wine.

Salting the family pig

William Cobbett's Cottage Economy (1820s) tells English labourers how to turn a pig into a year of bacon. His rules are strict:

• Rub the sides (“flitches”) with dry salt and stack them in a salting trough with a drain. Never let them sit in brine, which gives bacon the taste of ship's barrel-pork.
• Change the salt every four or five days and swap the flitches top to bottom.
• For the sides of a 240-pound hog, allow about six weeks, longer in dry weather or a dry room.
• Store the finished bacon packed in dry wood ashes, which keep out flies and air. Cobbett says it will keep two or even three years.

Salmon, beef and tongue in the Victorian kitchen

Mrs Beeton describes curing salmon by splitting it, rubbing it with salt, keeping it in pickle for about six weeks, then packing it in casks between layers of salt. Her “Hunter's beef” rubs a 25-pound round of beef with a pound of salt, bay salt, sugar, saltpetre and spices.

Why it's called “corned” beef

Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) lists twelve ways to preserve food, from freezing to smoking. Salting, she writes, comes in two kinds: dry salting, and corning, which is salting in brine. The name comes from the large “corns,” or grains, of salt once used.

Salt makes things cold, too

Salt also helped make ice cream before freezers. Farmer's instructions pack the churn with three measures of crushed ice to one of coarse rock salt for smooth ice cream, and equal parts for a coarser frappé. “Salt water,” she explains, “is what effects freezing,” so never drain it off until the cream is frozen.

Salt for the journey

Explorers needed salt to keep meat edible. The Lewis and Clark Expedition spent the winter of 1805–06 boiling seawater on the Oregon coast to make about four bushels of salt for the trip home.

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