...but to know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime Wisdom,
Paradise Lost, Book VIII
John Milton
Overture
I wasn’t present at the birth of this culinary era, which has come to glorify those white crystals spawned by the sea, but I did play a role in its formative stages, helping to construct the pedestal that has now become practically an altar of worship. But, this isn’t another piece about the “History Of Salt” chock-full of stale facts, figures, and anecdotes - those I hope to keep to a minimum. There have been enough books about salt over the last decade, mainly examining the 'Big Picture,' - first, Salt as Nature’s gift and then as Man’s plunder - Mark Kurlansky’s Salt being the most readable. Heaven knows there have also been articles galore about sea salt, - some of which I’ve had a hand in - mainly to document its resurrection and to lionize its (alleged) culinary potential. No, this is a commentary nearer and dearer to my heart and my palate, and hopefully to those of at least a few others.
Salt never really vanished from our table, but it did slip from our collective culinary concern. Even as we were growing up with that homey, but highly processed, thought, “when it rains, it pours,” I believe that sea salt in any number of its manifestations was available, if one knew where to look. On the other hand, who would have even guessed that all salts were not created equal, at least for the table anyway - having been a secret fancier of the rock salt used to melt icy sidewalks in wintertime, all I knew as a child was, ‘salty is salty.’ No, I think it was a little flower that ignited the current sea salt mania; a flower that had been sprouting in nature for millennia and treated as just another part of the sea’s bounty by those who gathered it. That is, until a savvy French chef informed those rural folk that the flower springing from the sea was in fact Fleur de Sel, the Flower of all Salts. Word spread slowly at first, although eventually, enterprising importers from the U.S. started the gold rush, but I am getting ahead of myself.
What started out with the best of intentions, by most anyway, seems to have gotten out of hand over the last five years or so. At first it was just a limited and tightly controlled supply with a bit of over-zealous selling, but then came the over-packaging and over-romanticizing of salts, rare and common, from around the world and of course, the consequent higher prices. Rapidly increasing demand generated more and more publicity, and all sorts of questionable products began hitting the market including those from counterfeit sources and counterfeit traditions, not to mention resurrecting traditions abandoned over a century ago because they were found to be unsustainable even then. Last but not least, there was the arrival of the oxymoronic “organic” and “biodynamic” sea salts at even higher prices. I guess that I’m offering this lamentation to atone for my deeds, - those that helped set these unintended consequences in motion - and by doing so, I hope to shed some light through the “fume, or emptiness, or fond impertinence” and leave the interested reader with enough information to make an informed purchase, such as not paying more than a few dollars for a pound of gray salt...Caveat Emptor.
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