SALT Sayings

Where do we get those crazy sayings related to SALT? I've just started this page, like all the others, so if you have any sayings that you would like incorportaed here, please send them to me via the email button below.

Who's worth their weight in salt, and why? Answer forthcoming

"With all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt."
Moses, Leviticus

"Salt is what makes things taste bad when it isn't in them."
Anonymous

“Thou hadst better eat salt with the Philosophers of Greece, than sugar with the Courtiers of Italy.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Poor Richard's Almanac

"Where would we be without salt?"
James Beard (1903-1985)

"Of all smells, bread; of all tastes, salt."
George Herbert, English poet (1593-1633)

"It is a true saying that a man must eat a peck of salt with his friend before he knows him."
Miguel de Cervantes, 'Don Quixote'

“Trust no one unless you have eaten much salt with him.”
Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (106-43 BC)
Roman Statesman

“Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was willing to labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and of mythic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its links with experience of the sacred.”
Margaret Visser, 20th century author

“Salt is the policeman of taste: it keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing over the weaker.”
Margaret Visser, 20th century author

“Salt is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea.”
Pythagoras (580 BC - 500 BC)

“It takes four men to dress a salad: a wise man for the salt, a madman for the pepper, a miser for the vinegar, and a spendthrift for the oil.”
unknown

"Many are the ways and many the recipes for dressing hares; but this is the best of all, to place before a hungry set of guests a slice of roasted meat fresh from the spit, hot, season'd only with plain, simple salt....All other ways are quite superfluous, such as when cooks pour a lot of sticky, clammy sauce upon it."
Archestratus

"An honest laborious Country-man, with good Bread, Salt and a little Parsley, will make a contented Meal with a roasted Onion."
John Evelyn (1620-1706)

"Ham: 40 days in salt, 40 days hanging, in 40 days eaten."
Joseph Delteil, French writer (1894-1978).
La Cuisine paleolithique, 1964

"Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food."
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

"Take it with a grain of salt."
Explanation: 1. Understand that something being said is not to be taken seriously. 2. To know that what is being said may have a very strong bias.

"Salt away - save something (usually money) for future use."
This stems from the days before refrigeration, when salt was widely used to preserve meat and fish for later consumption.

"Salt of the earth, the - the best of people, especially the most dependable."
The expression comes from the Bible, where Jesus describes his disciples as 'the salt of the earth [i.e. of mankind]' in Matthew, 5: 13. He meant something different, however: salt has preserving and purifying qualities (newborn babies in the east were rubbed with salt to promote health) and so the disciples were being described as the agent by which mortal souls were to be purified and preserved. The modern meaning, though related, is untheological.

"Below the salt."
Meaning: Common or lowly. See also 'beyond the pale'.

Origin: This is just one of the many English phrases that refer to salt, for example, 'worth his salt', 'with a grain of salt', 'the salt of the earth', etc. This is an indication of the long-standing importance given to salt in society.

In mediaeval England salt was expensive and only affordable by the higher ranks of society. Its value rested on its scarcity. Salt was less easily obtainable in northern Europe than in countries with warmer climates, where it could be obtained more cheaply by the evaporation of seawater. This value is the source of the high symbolic status given to salt in the day-to-day language that originated from England at that period.

Salt cellar owned by the Duke of Buckingham. At that time the nobility sat at the 'high table' and their commoner servants at lower trestle tables. Salt was placed in the centre of the high table. Only those of rank had access to it. Those less favoured on the lower tables were below (or beneath) the salt.

The term salt is used for the container the salt was kept in, as well as the condiment itself. The ornate and expensive nature of these salts was a reflection of the importance that salt was accorded.

As early as 1434 the word salt was used in this way, e.g. "A feir salt saler of peautre." (A fine-quality pewter salt cellar). Strictly speaking to be 'below the salt' was to be below the salt cellar.

The phrase was in use by the late 16th century, as this quotation from Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels, 1599 shows: "His fashion is not to take knowledge of him that is beneath him in Cloaths. He never drinks below the salt."

More coming . . . .