Michael Ruhlman reports, in his essential book, The Elements of Cooking, that Thomas
Keller believes that knowing how to salt food is “the most important thing for
a cook to know.” Mark Kurlansky wrote an entire book on the world history of
salt. Yet for most people, salt is simply a bit of table dressing; one half of
the obligatory cruet set. If it’s thought about or used at all, it’s reflexively
sprinkled on any savory dish, as if a decoration, an imperative of some kind
which has become a habit divorced from meaning: does the dish really need
salting? And what stuff, exactly, is this salt you’re putting on it?
Chances are it’s generic, industrially produced table salt —
Mortons, in all likelihood — whose claim to fame is that its umbrella girl logo
illustrates its motto: “When It Rains It Pours®.” (Yes, the registered trademark
needs to be there.) What this has done is convince many generations of Americans
that salt’s primary virtue is its pourability in any humidity level. Whoopee.
As for flavor, texture, color — well, if it was anything but pourable and
white, it wouldn’t work in the salt shaker, would it?
Mark Bitterman doesn’t want any truck with that. He’s a
self-proclaimed “selmelier,” a connoisseur of salt, and boy, does he know his
stuff. His book Salted serves as an
encyclopedia of salt that’s not
only aesthetically beautiful as a book, but is written with as much verve and
color as the salts he lovingly details. In fact, he calls the book a “manifesto
on the world’s most essential mineral,” which rightfully suggests that his
approach is more mission than memo.
If a sommelier is someone whose judgment you trust about
wine; someone, perhaps, who can allow you to see that wine can be an utterly
different substance than that grog you’ve always been served in a plastic cup
at parties, then a selmelier is someone who can do exactly that for your
ignorance about salt. The tools he uses in place of the ability to have us
actually taste salts are his words.
For example: there’s an entire section in this book about
“the poetry of describing salt.” This is what he says of Halen Môn,
a Welsh salt of which I am particularly fond: “Halen Môn offers a textural dimension beyond
that of most other flake salts, its crunch-upon-crunch layers vanishing before
calling undue attention to themselves, leaving behind a clearly defined
structure and pleasant minerality, ponderings for the mouth that are as
ungraspable as string theory.” I use a smoked Halen Môn crumbled into the soft tops of
chocolate chip cookies before baking. If you’ve never had chocolate chip
cookies accented with the right salt, you haven’t lived. Bitterman suggests
pairing it with “butternut squash coup; grilled fish; [or a] garden vegetable
sandwich,” and the smoked variety with “vanilla bean ice cream.”
I suspect I have let the cat out of the bag somewhat in
terms of my investment in this topic by confessing to not only knowing about
this artisanal salt, let alone having my own supply of it to use with cookies.
I keep the salts I use regularly in tiny pinch-pots within easy reach, and
re-fill them regularly. I am someone who relies on a salt-water gargle to stave
off any cold and soak any wound (and it works!).
One of those has always been Maldon sea salt from the Essex
coast. I thought it was just my humble opinion that nothing else could be as
perfect for enlivening a 7-minute boiled farm egg, but it appears Bitterman
agrees. His paean to this salt begins with a reverie about life’s good days and
bad days before claiming assertively that “Maldon doesn’t have off days.” In
describing its flavor, he writes “sea breeze with glitter in it.” But the note
that slays me is this observation: “Crushing Maldon between the finger and
thumb, and letting the flakes fall to the surface of your favorite food is
almost as satiating as eating it.” Amen, brother. I have been known, in private
moments standing in my kitchen, to grizzle a bit of Maldon between my fingers
just for the pleasure of it.
If the tongue is an important tool in appreciating and
balancing salt, then the fingers are too. Feeling the quality and texture of
the grain, and determining its occasionally odd greasiness (despite not
actually being greasy) is essential. It is here that one appreciates most fully
that a life spent only experiencing pourable salt is a tragedy.
If you eat — if you cook — then continuing to do so without
reading this book and/or ditching the table salt for something — anything —
else. Bitterman’s information panel for it reads thusly: "Type: industrial;
Crystal: homogeneous cubes; Color: abandoned factory windowpane; Flavor:
phenolitic paint followed by rusted barbed wire; Moisture: none; Origin:
various; Substitute(s): anything; Best With: shuffleboard lubricant.”
Try touching a bit to your tongue. Tell me he isn’t exactly,
excruciatingly right.
Bitterman and his wife Jennifer are the proprietors of
The Meadow.
