Saltpeter and the Wolf

Seated one day at the table next to a teenage nephew, I soon ran out of topics that bridged his generation and mine, and a painful silence settled over us both. Suddenly I thought of a subject that I knew we would have in common.

"At your school," I asked, "where do they put the saltpeter?"

He brightened at the question. "It's usually in the mashed potatoes. Where did they put it at your school?"

"Our headmaster got up in the morning and put it in the hot cereal," I said, "but in the Army we thought it was in the chipped beef. Tell me: How often do you get it?"

"Once or twice a week," he replied, "and also on special occasions. I mean, the headmaster always puts saltpeter in the food before dances."

"How do you know you're getting it?"

"You can taste the stuff," he said.

As we talked on, I was delighted to find that this ancient belief survives as stronglyas ever in the nation's youth. For if there is one thing that gives continuity to the galloping generations of American schoolboys, schoolgirls, campers and servicemen, it is thecertainty that saltpeter is being slipped into their meals to reduce their sexual urges. In theory this keeps their minds on work.

The belief is so old and tantalizing that I decided to track it — if possible — to its source. I began by making a survey of my middle-aged friends, and it turned out to be a sure-fire topic. All I had to do was drop the word "saltpeter" into a conversation and I might as well have dropped a bomb. People stopped talking about whatever dull topic they were talking about and plunged with relish into this one, their faces alight with a curiosity that time has never quenched. For an aura of mystery continues to surround the saltpeter story. Everybody knows everything about it, and yet — this is the spooky part — nobody knows anything.

Nobody, for instance, has ever witnessed the act of saltpetering the food, though legions of students have kept strict watch during their tours of duty as kitchen help. It is simply assumed that the cook keeps his saltpeter in an unmarked box and that he sprinklesit into the meals with a motion too fast for the human eye to see, or too casual to arouse suspicion. Nobody seems to know what saltpeter looks like.

Whether it works is a question, as I found in my survey, that evokes answers of every shade from a resentful yes to a defiant no. But on one point there is total agreement, and this is the belief that saltpeter is white and that it goes into white or whitish foods. How this notion arose is not hard to guess, for in the school and camp diets no colors come out of the kitchen with such stunning regularity as the small group that includes "oyster," "chalk" and "tattletale gray." White dominates the table, starting with dawn's early farina, continuing with midday's mashed potatoes, and ending with supper's flabby puddings.

White sauces are particularly suspicious. Surely it is no accident that chipped beef is such a staple of institutional cooking. Here is a meat that literally swims in a viscous sea — one so devoid of taste and color that it can't contain anything good and therefore must contain saltpeter. Possibly it was even invented for this very purpose, long ago, by a school cook stuck with a medicoculinary problem.

But there are half-a-dozen other traditional villains. "At our school," one matron in her 30s told me, "I just know it was in the fisheyes." She was referring, of course, to tapioca. The very fact that it bears this generic name is proof of its unpopularity, and this in turn makes it an ideal host for saltpeter, for on the whole, saltpeter is identified with foods that nobody likes.

Another big faction says that it goes into the fish — and with good reason. In the entire realm of cookery there is no substance whiter or drearier than a boarding-school sole or scrod. But this theory has one big flaw — many people don't like fish. They leave it on their plate, or merely pick at it, and so miss their allotted dose of saltpeter.

This is a risk that a wise headmaster would not take. He would more probably go to the other extreme and fix the vanilla ice cream. Many adults believe that this is where they got their saltpeter, and they are still angry about it. "Why do you think the headmaster gave us vanilla ice cream so often?" they asked me, flaring with remembered wrath. They have a point —it makes more sense to lace the coveted ice cream than the hated fish or fisheyes.

But one theory far outnumbers the rest, and that of course is the one that points the finger at mashed potatoes. In part this theory is based on the sheer repetition of mashedpotatoes in the school diet. But mainly, it is because mashed potatoes — at least as they are prepared in institutional kitchens — have a lumpy quality that the tongue encounters nowhere else. Within their soft white mass dwells a colony of hard little mounds, which could only be induced by some alien element. What more likely element than KNO3, as saltpeter is known to chemistry?

Confirmed in my own belief that saltpeter goes into white foods, I next wanted to learn how often it is administered. The question is a crucial one, obviously, for anybody whoknows the answer can arrange his eating habits accordingly. Most people feel that they got saltpeter once a week, but some feel that they were given a far heavier dose.

"We got it four or five times a week," one man told me. "Our headmaster was a very nervous type."

"Our headmaster," said another, "got up every morning and shook it into the breakfast." Quite a few people, in fact, made this statement and were absolutely sure of it. It wassimply the first item on the headmaster's daily schedule.

The dose was also increased (there is almost unanimous agreement here) at times of approaching contact with the opposite sex. "Our food was always saltier near the end of the term," I was told. This was to keep the boys and girls from straying into trouble during vacation and thereby sullying the school's good name. Any boy with hopes of conquest tookcare not to eat anything white during the preholiday week — a tactic which, needless to say, brought him close to starvation. Of all the strands in the saltpeter saga, this is one of the most sinister, for it would enable a headmaster to rule his wards even when they had passed beyond his jurisdiction — when they were, so to speak, operating on their own time. He also cracked down, evidently, just before school dances. "Boy, the Old Man really salted the food then!" many people said.

Nor does the Old Man rule only the boarding-school and summer-camp years. A World War II veteran recalls that his company cook showed him a weekly table of saltpeter doses, which varied with the different Army recipes. I never saw such a chart in my own Army days, but I did feel that my commanding officers would go to any length to repress me, for they never tired of giving us punitive lectures on "sex hygiene" and showing grisly films on venereal disease.

• • •

Up to this point my survey merely uncovered theories. But I was after facts, if any facts there were in this misty realm of legend and hearsay. I went first to the New York Public Library, which has 127 cards on "saltpeter." Not one, however, dealt with its biological effect or with its use in schools, camps, military institutions, prisons or any other monastic society. In fact, the majority dealt with its use as a fertilizer and as an explosive. Clearly I was on the wrong track here — to say the least. I had to get nearer the source, so I wrote to two friends who are headmasters of boys' boarding schools and asked them point-blank: "Do you or don't you?"

"I checked with our infirmarian," the first one wrote back, "and she said that when she was in nursing school she heard that saltpeter was served; with a member of our facultywho was an officer in the Navy, and he said that the sailors on board ship in the last war were certain of it, but that so far as he could ever ascertain, there was nothing to it; and lastly with our school doctor, who again had heard the rumor but had never encountered the application of saltpeter to meals."

The second headmaster was quite indignant. "I've been in the teaching business a long time," he replied, "and I've been in charge of school kitchens and known the cooks, and it's all a myth. I've been headmaster here for 21 years, and frankly, I spend as much timewith the (concluded on page 150)Saltpeter(continued from page 146) steward and dietitian as with anyone else, in the hope of having the food good, attractive and tasty. I have never heard of any saltpeter being put in our food. As a matter of fact, it's ridiculous to even think about it. So if you want to really know the truth as far as this headmaster is concerned, he has never seen any saltpeter put in the food, he knows nothing of any saltpeter ever having been put in any food, and the question is a glorification of the unimportant. At least, if the cooks did it, I never heard about it."

Strong evidence, I had to admit — but not conclusive. Did not both headmasters hedge slightly? You bet your chipped beef they did. I needed something more solid, so I went to our family doctor.

"It's curious," he said, "but medicine has hardly any use nowadays for potassium nitrate, or saltpeter. There was a time when it was inhaled — or put in cigars — to relieve bronchial spasms. Today we use it, and not too often, only in the treatment of kidney diseases, where we want the potassium. We never want the nitrate, which is actually harmful. In fact, saltpeter is a powerful poison if a person gets too much of it."

"But," I asked, "what about this matter of what it does to — I mean when I was in school we all knew that the headmaster put it ——"

"I must say," he broke in, "that I've heard about that all my life, but there's just no medical evidence to support it. What's more, potassium nitrate tastes very salty and isextremely hard to disguise, even in a small dose. The thera-peutic dose of potassium nitrate as a diuretic in kidney ailments is a half gram. You put a half gram of saltpeter in anything and it will be detected. Try it. Stop at the druggist's and get a pinch of saltpeter and put it in your coffee, and you'll see for yourself it's only a myth."

So that was it. I was at the end of the trail. It was only a myth. Myth! The word suddenly set off a carillon in my head. Any boob knows that myths don't just come fromnowhere. They come from somewhere — from some dim land called "race memory," from some cranny of the mind whose messages we receive, but indirectly. I hurried over to a psychoanalyst and put my problem to him.

"Oh, that's a very old and interesting legend," he said. "Of course psychiatry has a sound explanation for it. You'll find the basic hypothesis postulated in Freud's Totem and Taboo."

"Couldn't you just postulate it for me in your own words?" I asked.

"Well, it's quite simple, really. You see, this concept that something is being done to curb sexual impulses must spring from the unconsciousness of the individual, or, in thecase of a school, from the collective unconsciousness of all the students. A great deal of guilt accompanies masturbatory activities," he said. "For one thing, the fantasies accompanying these activities often center on the young masters' wives. The saltpeter myth isan intrapsychic reaction that the student develops to handle his chaotic thoughts at thisage. It's somewhat like a paranoid reaction — though not as strong — because it takes the form of guilt and suspicion. The boy thinks 'The headmaster's going to punish me.' "

"How is this tied in with Freud's theory?" I asked.

"Well, you know Freud felt that all men were constitutionally afraid of their fathers.He theorized that in the first society on earth, the sons ultimately slew their fathers and took over the leadership of the tribe, including the sexual rights with their own mothers. In this 'primal parricide,' as Freud called it — and, incidentally, you'll find the tale confirmed in the mythology of many races — the sons incurred overwhelming guilt about the return of the father's spirit and the awful punishment that he would inflict. This punishment would naturally be castration."

"Naturally," I said.

"Now you can see how the saltpeter myth would grow out of all this," the analyst went on. "Saltpeter would temporarily castrate. In the minds of schoolboys or soliders or sailors it would be the logical step for a headmaster or commanding officer to take as a reprisal for their guilty sexual thoughts. This is why the word goes out, when a ship is approaching port or when a school is about to have a dance, that saltpeter is being put into the food."

"Then it's a group reaction more than an individual reaction?" I asked.

"In general, yes. When a boy goes off to boarding school or camp he is heavily exposedfor the first time to erotic talk about girls. The fact that everyone talks about the subject gives it a collective sanction. And by the same token, the saltpeter is directed by the headmaster at the collective group."

"Many of the young members really seem to believe," I said, "that the headmaster goes to the kitchen first thing every morning to pour the saltpeter. How do you explain that?"

"It's all part of the same delusion," he said. "I had a headmaster who lent himself to that kind of omnipotence. He got up early each day and walked over the entire school grounds with an enormous great Dane. Any boy seeing him would think of him as the all-seeing, all-knowing chief of the tribe. If you were being a good boy, he was being a good headmaster, and if not, you would suspect him of terrible retribution.

"Saltpeter is the perfect punishment, of course, because it's so subtle. You have to eat, so nobody can escape the chief's revenge. You are helpless and choiceless, and it's only what you deserve for the crime that you might even be thinking about girls this way."

I staggered out of the analyst's opaque world into the clear reality of New York City, visions of my own headmaster swirling in my mind. I saw his kindly figure carved into a totem pole with a vial of saltpeter in one hand and a lollipop in the other.

Only one question remained. How, of all the chemical substances that the earth has yielded, did the legend focus on saltpeter? Here again the scholars have been remiss, and the usual dictionaries offer scant help. The sole clue lurks in the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, which says that one meaning of "saltpeter" derives from the French La Salpétrière, "a hospital for women at Paris, formerly a prison for women." Its English equivalent, says the O.E.D., is "saltpetre house," the first recorded use of which (1767) is: "a woman condemned to be branded and confined to the saltpetre house for nine years."

That the myth came into the Anglo-Saxon world by this route seems a good bet, for prisons have always figured strongly in the legend — if not as strongly as schools, camps and Army bases, that is only because fewer people have come out into polite society totell the tale. But the sexual problems of jail inmates are proverbial, and a rumor easilycould have swept some early English "saltpetre house" that the warden was putting a whitepowder into the food to curb the prisoners' appetites.

As for the origin of La Salpétrière, I have a hunch that Saltpeter and Saint Peter are subtly intertwined — or were several centuries ago — but I'll leave that to other researchers. My own investigation ended with a stop at the druggist, who measured out a half gram of saltpeter and gave it to me. I took it home with trembling hands — here at last I was face to face with the enemy. The powder was, not at all to my surprise, white. The crystals were larger than ordinary salt, but they could easily be ground up into, say, mashed potatoes or fisheyes or vanilla ice cream. I dumped the little grains into a cup of coffee and they dissolved instantly. No man would know, at least by looking, that the coffee had been treated.

Shakily I lifted the cup and took a sip. It tasted terrible. I started to take an-other swallow, but some invisible force — some primal instinct that came from I know not where — pushed my hand back to the table. I took the cup out to the kitchen and poured the coffee down the drain. A man can't be too careful.