Salted fish in the context of "Kipper"

Salting is the preservation of food with dry edible salt. It is related to pickling in general and more specifically to brining, also known as fermenting (preparing food with brine, that is, salty water), and is one form of curing. It is one of the oldest methods of preserving food, and two historically significant salt-cured foods are salted fish (usually dried and salted cod or salted herring) and salt-cured meat (such as bacon). Vegetables such as runner beans and cabbage are also often preserved in this manner.

Salting is used because most bacteria, fungi and other potentially pathogenic organisms cannot survive in a highly salty environment, due to the hypertonic nature of salt. Any living cell in such an environment will become dehydrated through osmosis and die or become temporarily inactivated. Fine grained salts were more expensive but also absorbed moisture faster than coarse salt.

Dry measures are units of volume to measure bulk commodities that are not fluids and that were typically shipped and sold in standardized containers such as barrels. They have largely been replaced by the units used for measuring volumes in the metric system and liquid volumes in the imperial system but are still used for some commodities in the US customary system. They were or are typically used in agriculture, agronomy, and commodity markets to measure grain, dried beans, dried and fresh produce, and some seafood. They were formerly used for many other foods, such as salt pork and salted fish, and for industrial commodities such as coal, cement, and lime.

The names are often the same as for the units used to measure liquids, despite representing different volumes. The larger volumes of the dry measures apparently arose because they were based on heaped rather than "struck" (leveled) containers.

Dried and salted cod, sometimes referred to as salt cod or saltfish or salt dolly, is cod which has been preserved by drying after salting. Cod which has been dried without the addition of salt is stockfish. Salt cod was long a major export of the North Atlantic region, and has become an ingredient of many cuisines around the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean.

Dried and salted cod has been produced for over 500 years in Newfoundland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. It is also produced in Norway, where it is called klippfisk, literally "cliff-fish". Traditionally, it was dried outdoors by the wind and sun, often on cliffs and other bare rock-faces. Today, klippfisk is usually dried indoors with the aid of electric heaters. But in western and northern Norway fish is still dried outdoors, mainly for export to southern Europe markets.