She Only Cares About Cultivation
Chapter 210: [209] Tasty and Pretty Fisherman 60 (third watch)

Chapter 210: [209] Tasty and Pretty Fisherman 60 (third watch)

Afterward, Xiao Yu gave Yaya a primer on some health issues related to the matter, and although the child was utterly confused by terms like bacteria and harmful substances, which she didn’t understand, she grasped the gist of it, which was that seawater couldn’t be drunk directly, nor could it be eaten even after boiling -- in fact, Yaya didn’t like it either.

"Big sis, seawater tastes terrible; it’s bitter, it’s salty, and it has this astringent flavor that’s hard to describe. It’s incredibly unappetizing, and pickles preserved in seawater don’t taste as good as those cured with salt. That’s what all the aunties in the village say."

"Of course, it doesn’t taste good. Do you think seawater contains only salt? It contains other things as well. Moreover, salt boiled directly from seawater isn’t fit for consumption either, as it contains too many impurities, which are only detrimental and offer no benefits to people."

"These substances can’t be seen with the naked eye, and eating them might seem harmless at first, but over time, they will accumulate and cause many health issues. You must be thinking, ’All this time, I haven’t heard of anyone getting sick from eating seawater,’ right?"

Yaya opened her mouth, slightly embarrassed, "Indeed, I’ve never heard of anyone getting sick from eating seawater."

"That’s because a person’s life is too long, and within the natural cycle of birth, aging, sickness, and death, people eat the Five Grains, creatures from the sky, the ground, and the sea -- everything, but there are so many illnesses, many incurable, how can you be sure they weren’t caused by eating seawater? Just like this epidemic, you only know it’s brought by rats but don’t know how these rats contracted the disease, right?"

Although Yaya was young, she couldn’t deny the logic in Xiao Yu’s words. For instance, Grandma’s tuberculosis was caused by a fever, but how could one just get a fever out of nowhere? Was it likely due to the unseen so-called germs or viruses around her?

"Alright, don’t worry too much. I’m just saying, remember this for the future. However, living by the sea and not knowing how to make salt is something we can’t afford. Go, fetch a few buckets of seawater, and today I’ll teach you how to make salt."

Yaya’s eyes nearly popped out in shock: "Sis, am I hearing you right? Can you really make salt?"

Xiao Yu lifted her chin with a hint of smugness, "What’s so hard about that? It just requires a bit of firewood."

She knew the salt she made couldn’t meet the standards of the future, but compared to the coarse salt here, she felt it was already much better.

In ancient times, without the modern precision instruments of later generations to purify and iodize salt or to add various nutritious substances, producing fine white crystalline salt was no easy feat.

As is commonly known, seawater is the "hometown" of salt, containing various salts. About 90% of it is sodium chloride, otherwise known as salt.

It also contains magnesium chloride, magnesium sulfate, magnesium carbonate, and other salts containing elements such as potassium, iodine, sodium, bromine, etc.

Magnesium chloride is the main ingredient of the brine used to coagulate tofu and tastes bitter, which is why seawater, which has a high salt content, tastes both salty and bitter.

What she was aiming to do now was to extract the edible salt from the seawater using the simplest method, and not the bitter and salty kind.

The method seems simple; it involves just pouring the seawater into an iron pot to boil. Once dried, the white particles left behind would be the salt, but it wasn’t entirely done this way, as the resulting salt wouldn’t be pure enough and would still taste bitter.

Thus, when you watch those salt-making videos, you’ll notice they don’t evaporate the seawater completely before adding more to it. Instead, they keep some seawater aside and only collect the layer of salt crystals from the bottom to avoid a too bitter taste.

Likewise, when we boil the salt, we add seawater after boiling off half, continue boiling, and once half is gone again, we discard the remaining seawater; the salt obtained this way tends to be a bit better than if it were completely boiled dry.

After hearing her explain how to make salt, Yaya and the others reluctantly scraped off the soup and set it aside in a bowl, then they added seawater to the pot to start boiling the salt.

That entire late afternoon, the two of them were too preoccupied to eat, squatting in front of the stove, constantly adding firewood. It wasn’t clear how much firewood and seawater they used, but after boiling down two large buckets of seawater, they produced about three to four taels of salt.

— This Chapter includes points about salt-making knowledge, so I’ve voluntarily added 300 words to compensate for the encyclopedic information.