salt something away

Example: “She salted away a little money from every paycheck for her retirement.”

Origin: Salting was the principal method of preserving food before refrigeration, and it was serious infrastructure rather than a kitchen technique. Meat and fish packed in salt or brine would keep for months, which is what made long sea voyages, standing armies, and surviving a northern winter possible at all; salt cod and salt beef were staples of trade and provisioning across the Atlantic world. Salting something away therefore meant putting it beyond spoilage and into reserve — not consuming it now, and specifically preparing for a period when nothing fresh would be available. The figurative extension to money is nineteenth-century American, and it keeps the original sense exactly: what is salted away is deliberately withheld from present use against a lean stretch expected later.