Salt is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea.
Pythagoras (580 BC - 500 BC)
It’s now difficult to tell just how long sea salts from Europe have been imported into this country as ‘gourmet’ products, but it’s been at least since 1976 when The Grain and Salt Society was founded and started selling Celtic Sea Salt from Brittany. In those early days, I believe that it was sold mainly in health food stores, helping reinforce the notion that it was a ‘natural’ product. Moving forward two decades, the massive growth in demand for European specialty foods, mainly from France and Italy has just begun, and a few of these products were sea salts, mainly from France, but probably also from Sicily. At the time, sea salt was too common, inexpensive and heavy to be worth the trouble of importing on a serious scale. That is, until a curious chef with a sensitive palate stumbled upon a different type of salt on the coast of Brittany, something out of the ordinary in its method of production, its appearance, and its taste. He was so enamored with this salt - or so marketing savvy - that he called it Fleur de Sel, “flower of salt,” or so the story goes.
It isn’t clear from all of the conflicting ‘expert’ information on the Internet whether today’s Fleur de Sel is something that was known and intentionally gathered as far back as ancient Rome, - this would make the current craze a ‘re-discovery’ - or whether it is truly a contemporary product, a belief to which I ascribe. For my purposes, it doesn’t really matter if reality differs from culinary legend, all that matters is that by the end of the last decade a very expensive sea salt was about to take hold of the world’s culinary imagination, and with the help of the Internet, Food TV, professional chefs, and most of the culinary periodicals be the impetus for the sea salt mania that has gripped the world from Tokyo to Moscow and Reykjavik to Santiago.
I entered the sea salt picture in the midst of the Internet Bubble in 1998, and at the time there seemed to be three importers whose respective Fleurs de Sel were the most widely found online, in gourmet shops and in high-end supermarkets. Each importer also had a corresponding ‘regular’ coarse sea salt, branded either as Sel Gris, ‘gray salt,’ or Sel de Mer, ‘sea salt.’ The most highly visible Fleur de Sel at the time was the Esprit du Sel brand in the plastic jar produced by a cooperative on France’s Ile de Ré - one of the three salt producing areas on the Brittany Coast, the other two being Guérande and Noirmoutier. This Fleur de Sel was sold at Williams-Sonoma and other gourmet shops. The next most visible was the Fleur de Sel in a glass jar from M. Gilles Hervey, an independent producer in Guérande - he produced it in the traditional manner and refused to sell to a co-op where it might be blended with inferior salt. The M. Gilles Hervey was usually the more highly rated by chefs and ‘foodies.’ The last of the three was the Fleur de Sel de Camargue from the South of France sold in a colorful paper tube - it was a bit controversial since it was collected in salt marshes near a nuclear power plant - what few people knew at the time was that it was produced by France’s largest salt company.
At the Internet specialty food boutique where I worked we sold a great deal of all three of these sea salts as the new millennium dawned, and we also sold a great deal of gray salt from both Esprit du Sel and M. Gilles Hervey, along with an coarse red salt from Hawaii. We did a lot of romancing to sell the very expensive Fleurs de Sel and the relatively pricey Sels Gris, using history, chemistry, testimonials from chefs, recipes, and in-store tastings, and we weren’t alone, the food magazines and tele-chefs were also lauding these salts. Ounce for ounce the Guérande was the most expensive, followed by the Camargue and then the Ile de Ré - with four or five ounces of Fleur de Sel selling for significantly more than a pound of gray salt which sold for about three times the price of kosher salt. Each of these salts was tightly controlled by its respective importer both in price and in packaging - ‘branding,’ you know.
We strongly recommended using Fleur de Sel only as a finishing salt and Sel Gris as an everyday salt for cooking and the table. At the time, my palate had been in training with food and wine for almost a decade, and it was a stretch for me to pick up on the flavor nuances of Fleur de Sel, and then only as a finish to simple flavors. I had more than a few customers who wanted to use only the best, and actually cooked with it, and I was sure that many people bought it because ‘it was the thing to do,’ even though they really couldn’t taste the difference.
By early 2002, ‘fancy’ sea salts began to achieve notoriety in business periodicals like the NYT, WSJ, and Forbes, and I became buyer for the website. Spurred on by all of the press and demand, I was in a continuing search for new sea salts. I was also becoming annoyed at the lack of options in Fleur de Sel. One of the things that bugged me the most was the cost of shipping salt in glass jars, and so I was interested in buying M. Gilles Hervey Fleur de Sel in bulk and repacking it in re-sealable pouches, preferable in smaller amounts to lower the price. This wasn’t an option with the Ile de Ré and Camargue salts, and as it turned out, the importer of the Hervey Fleur de Sel wouldn’t do it for me. At about this time we also started selling salts from Wales, England, and Italy and while they were all less expensive than Fleur de Sel they were still more than twice the price of Sel Gris. There seemed to be no end to the public’s demand.
With a stroke of luck in 2003, a relatively new importer that I bought from started bringing in the sea salts from another traditional Guérande salt farmer, Didier Aube. We had an online exclusive, and offered Fleur de Sel in 250 gram (8.8 oz.) bags and Sel Gris in 1 Kilo (2.2 lbs.) bags - at lower prices. I was eventually able to buy both in bulk and repack as a significantly lower price than the Hervey and even most of the other Fleurs de Sel that were then being newly imported from Guérande and Noirmoutier. A year later, my supplier was also able to find an independent producer on the Ile de Ré at a lower price than the Esprit du Sel. Unfortunately, by then our packaging and pricing were going in the wrong direction. Pandora’s Box had been opened and out flowed new sources for established sea salts, newly imported sea salts from all over the world, ‘flavored’ sea salts, and even companies specializing in just the importation, packaging and sale of sea salts. With the market getting very crowded it seemed that ‘branding’ became even more important than the salts, and this resulted in more and more over-packaging, over-romanticizing, and…counterfeiting.
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