last highlighted date: 2024-10-05
Highlights
- In the last part we looked at how the Dutch took the dirty, solar-evaporated salt of France, Portugal and Spain, known as “bay salt” or black salt, and refined it to a white salt fit for butter, cheese, and preserving herring, which they made by burning their plentiful supplies of peat — the economic underpinning for the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age. Soon, however, Dutch peat was to face a new competitor: British coal.