The salt arrived last

A Naga meal arrives with a small dish on the side, and in it is salt and chilli, sometimes a little fermented fish, sometimes nothing but the two. The pot itself has no salt in it. It has bamboo shoot, or smoked pork, or a bundle of dried greens, and it tastes sour, smoky and deep, but it does not taste salted. Visitors read that as a cuisine that under-seasons. It is a cuisine that had to decide where the salt would go, and put it at the end.

The reason is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is on record. In 1878 the colonial administration issued 1,995 passes to Angami men to travel down into the plains to trade. Of those, 1,706 carried down Rs 7,943 between them for a single purchase: salt. Two hundred and seven bought Manipuri cloth. The remainder took forty-five ponies. Four out of five journeys out of the hills were a salt run, and everything else the hills produced — ivory, wax, chillies, cloth, conch shell — went down as payment for it.

Salt was money, and money was salt

Where salt had to be carried for days, it stopped behaving like a seasoning and started behaving like currency. Konyak buyers on the Burma side are recorded paying for a slave with twenty brass discs, a pig and one lump of salt — the salt priced alongside the pig, not alongside the spices. Villages on the trade routes held salt in the way a bank holds notes, and the standard unit was the cake: pressed, dried, stackable, and easy to divide.

There was one place in the region with salt of its own, and it explains a lot about Manipur. Four brine wells — Ningail, Chundrakong, Sikhong and Waikhong — sat about fourteen miles northeast of the capital, at the foot of the hills. The water was boiled down and the salt pressed into cakes; output averaged around 150 maunds a month, sold wholesale at about six rupees a maund in 1873. The wells belonged to the raja, who took thirty per cent of the output, and the work was done by the Loi, the caste at the bottom of Manipuri society. A monopoly plus a caste monopoly is a price, and a price is what turns a mineral into a purchase.

Then the price was broken from outside, and the way it was broken is one of the more cynical episodes in the region's food history. After 1891 the British administration imported Liverpool salt through Burma and sold it cheaper than the wells could produce. Local traders responded by melting the imported salt down and recasting it into the shape and appearance of the local cakes, so that customers would accept it. It worked. The brine industry went into decline, and a valley that had made its own salt for centuries began buying someone else's, in a package designed to look like its own.

What a kitchen does without salt

Salt is not only a flavour. It is the cheapest preservative there is: it lowers water activity, which is why brine, dry-salting and pickling are the first technologies of every settled cuisine. Take it away and you have to solve the same problem another way, and the eastern hills solved it three ways at once.

The first was fermentation with no salt in it at all — and this is the part that is genuinely unusual. The fermented fish of Manipur, ngari, is packed into an earthen pot with no salt added and sealed for months; the fermented bamboo shoots — soibum in Manipur, mesu in Sikkim, rep in Mizoram — are made the same way. In most of maritime Asia, fish and vegetables are fermented in brine, and the salt does the selecting: it suppresses the organisms you do not want while the ones you do want get on with it. Without salt, the selection has to be done by excluding air instead. Which is why the pots are lined with mustard oil until the clay is saturated, packed tight by foot, and sealed with mud and cow dung slurry. The seal is doing the job the brine would have done.

The second was smoke. Meat hung above the hearth for weeks loses water, takes on phenols from the smoke, and forms a dry surface layer that mould does not like. It is a slower and less reliable method than salting, and it costs fuel, but the fuel is free if you are already burning wood to cook and to keep warm. Naga smoked pork is not a delicacy in origin; it is what a household does with a pig in a place where the alternative was nothing.

The third is the one outsiders rarely notice, because it does not taste like a substitute. In Assam, and along the valley edges, the mineral note in a dish comes from ash: dried banana peel, or the stem of the plantain, burnt and the ash steeped in water and filtered. The result is alkaline — potassium carbonate rather than sodium chloride — and it does something salt cannot. It softens vegetables fast, it raises the pH so greens keep their colour, and it gives a faintly slippery, mineral finish that Assamese cooking calls khar. A cuisine that cannot buy sodium went and got potassium instead, from a plant it already grew.

And then the salt comes to the table

Put those three together and the shape of the plate follows. If the salt is not in the pot, it has to be somewhere, and the somewhere is a saucer. The characteristic Naga condiment is not a sauce but an assembly: chilli, salt, sometimes ngari, sometimes a little ash, mashed together and put on the table so that each person can correct their own bowl. That is a different architecture from a curry, where the seasoning is decided once, by the cook, before anyone sits down. It moves a decision from the kitchen to the diner, and it exists because salt was too expensive to be wrong with.

There is a second-order effect worth naming, because it explains the smell people remember. A salt-free ferment is a protein ferment. The bacteria break the fish down into free amino acids and peptides, and the ammonia-like, cheese-rind, fermented-bean smell that people either love or cannot get past is the honest signal that proteolysis is happening — that is where the savoury depth comes from. Salted fish ferments smell too, but they smell later, and slower. Without salt, the process is faster and louder, and the pot has a shorter working life once opened. Which is why the quantities are small, the pots are small, and the ferment is used by the spoon rather than by the handful.

When the shortage ended

Two things happened in the twentieth century, and they arrived in the reverse order to what you would expect. First the salt itself became ordinary: the Kangra valley trial of 1956 to 1972 showed that iodised salt could take goitre prevalence down from around forty per cent, and the National Goitre Control Programme followed in 1962. A mineral that had once cost a week's walking became a public-health vehicle, subsidised, iodised, and sold in every shop in the hills. Nobody had to walk to Nowgong for it again.

Then the substitutes became expensive. Axone, anishi and smoked pork are now the items a Naga household in Kohima or Dimapur buys at a premium, and the ones a restaurant in Delhi charges extra for. The fermented bamboo shoot that once stood in for salt is sold in jars at airport prices. The shortage has been solved and its solution has become the cuisine's signature — which is the ordinary fate of every food invented under constraint. What is worth noticing is not that the technique survived. It is that the price inverted: the thing that was cheap because it was everywhere is now dear because it is a memory, and the thing that was dear because it came from far away is now so cheap nobody thinks about it while shaking it over a plate.

This is entry 13 of Food in About India. The pillar's argument — grain, fat and what a place could not get — is set out on the pillar page.