Let me tell you about Saltpeter

We are talking about curing. We are telling the story of how sodium nitrite became part of our curing mixes. At first we accessed the power of nitrogen to cure meat through saltpeter. The fact that it is potassium nitrate or sodium nitrate (Chilean Saltpeter) was not originally known.

Since antiquity, all over the world, from Mesopotamia to China, they knew about certain potent salts that change the colour of the meat to redish/ pinkish and gave it longevity! The reddening effect of saltpeter in meat curing was well known in late Roman times.

These ancients could not tell if saltpeter occurred naturally or was it something that had to be nourished or cultivated by humans. They wondered how to take the impurities out of the salt.

Nobody could explain its energy. Saltpeter had many ancient uses. To cure meat, as an essential ingredient in gunpowder, as fertalizer, medicine, for cooling beverages and in glass-making.

Almost every great civilization used it to cure meat. The Chinese and Italians used it to make gunpowder. There is record of gunpowder being used in India as early as 1300 BCE, probably introduced by the Monguls.

Saltpeter was used in ancient Asia and in Europe from the 1500’s to cool beverages and to ice foods. “Essentially, during the process of the saltpetre dissolving in the water the energy needed to break the bonds of the salt pulls heat from the surrounding water, thus decreasing the overall temperature in the basin”.

The first reported references to the characteristic flavor of cured meat produced by the addition of saltpeter during meat preservation and curing were made as early as 1835.

Some speculated, that it contained the "Spiritus Mundi", the ‘nitrous universal spirit’ that could unlock the nature of the universe!

Peter Whitehorney, the Elizabethan theorist wrote in 1500’s about saltpeter, “I cannot tell how to be resolved, to say what thing properly it is except it seemeth it hath the sovereignty and quality of every element”.

Paracelsus, the founder of toxicology who lived in the late 1400’s and early 1500’s said that “saltpeter is a mythical as well as chemical substance with occult as well as material connections.” The people of his day saw “a vital generative principle in saltpetre, ‘a notable mystery the which, albeit it be taken from the earth, yet it may lift up our eyes to heaven’”

From the 1400’s to the late 1800’s scientific writers probed the properties of this magical compound.

People said that “Saltpeter encompassed the “miraculum mundi”, the “material universalis” through which ‘our very lives and spirits were preserved. Its threefold nature evoked ‘that incomprehensible mystery of … the divine trinity,’ quoting Thomas Timme who wrote in 1605, in his translation of the Paracelsian Joseph Duchesne.

“Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor and Privy Councillor under James I, described saltpeter as the energizing “spirit of the earth.””

“Robert Boyle who did experiments trying to understand saltpeter found it, ‘the most catholic of salts, a most puzzling concrete, vegetable, animal, and even mineral, both acid and alkaline, and partly fixed and partly volatile. The knowledge of it may be very conductive to the discovery of several other bodies, and to the improvement of diverse parts of natural philosophy”

In India they mined saltpeter from the earth and thousands of small villages were engaged in its production. It grew like fungus on the walls of cellars and around toilets. It seemed as if it occurs wherever urine and dung occurs such as in bat caves.

In Germany they developed technology whereby they created their own saltpeter. So versed in its production was the average person in Germany that authors in this time did not even bother to detail the processes.

Lazarus Ercker (1530-1594), chief master of the mines of Emperor Rudolph II in Bohemia, wrote arguably the most detailed account on the production of saltpeter in ‘The right and most perfect way of the whole work of saltpetre’. A German translation appeared in Prague in 1574 and in Frankfurt in 1580.

Still, despite the impact of the renaissance and tremendous advances in fields of biology and the natural sciences, people could only appreciate saltpeter by what it did without any understanding of how it worked.

In the late 1770’s a chemical instructor said about saltpeter: “‘we are much in the dark as to the origin and generation’ of saltpeter, though he knew it to be ‘found among earth and stone that have been impregnated by animal and vegetable juices susceptible of purification, and have long been exposed to air. . . . It is the product of the elements deposited in the bosom of the earth, and may not be improperly called the universal and unspecific mercury”.

“Written knowledge of saltpeter filtered into England in 1540 with Vannoccio Biringuccio’s De la pirotechnia. This work was eventually translated into English and included accounts of the making of explosives.

Naturally, it is found in countries with a warm climate and high rainfall, “ammonia resulting from the putrefaction and decay of nitrogenous materials is washed into the soil by rainfall, to be oxidized by bacteria, yielding nitrate. . . In countries like India, saltpeter is leached from the ground as sheets of water left by monsoon flooding evaporate. A crust of saltpeter, including mineral salts, spreads across the ground, and can be dug up and refined into pure potassium nitrate.”

It is also made by human endeavor. Where the people of Germany chose to make their own saltpeter, in England they harvested saltpeter earth and extracted it from the niter enriched soil. Saltpetermen scoured the English countryside and dug up any place where the ground could have been impregnated with animal and human urine and dung.

Peter Whitehorn, the Elizabethan theorist said that saltpeter ‘is a mixture of many substances, gotten out of fire and water of dry and dirty ground.’ It could sometimes be found as an efflorescent or ‘flower that growth out of new walls, in cellars, or of that ground that is found loose within tombs or desolate caves where rain can not come in.’ But saltpeter could also be nourished or encouraged to grow by adding ‘the dung of beasts’ to the earth. A distinction was made between ‘natural saltpeter’ which only needed to be scraped from walls, and ‘artificial saltpeter’, which required digging and refinement. The two kinds ‘partook of the very same virtue’ (according to Whitehorn, relaying Biringuccio) except that some /beasts, converted into earth, in stables or in dunghills of long time not used”.

After 1850’s the East Indian Company solved the supply problem of Saltpeter by importing it from India where it occurred naturally and was also efficiently produced. It was the largest traded commodity by weight of the Dutch East Indian Company who established the trading post at the Southern tip of Africa that later became Cape Town.

The breakthrough as to its chemical composition came by the work of Antoine Lavoisier in 1777 when he analysed nitric acid.

From: https://earthwormexpress.com Unusual and untold stories from the world of food science.
Photo: Old journals from the Imperial Cold Storage and Supply Company Ltd, created by Sir David De Villiers Graaff in Cape Town.