Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [1]
When I made my discovery, I was motoring along on the picturesque D836 road from Paris to Le Havre. In the mood to splurge, I began looking for a relais—the French equivalent of an American truck stop, offering traditional food at affordable prices. Unlike the United States, where chain restaurants now dominate the roadside, France still has a good number of relais that exist as distinctive local enterprises. They buy local ingredients, cook specialty regional dishes, and serve them with locally made wines and spirits; thanks to them it is still possible to eat your way across the thousands of miles of French highways experiencing the country’s dozens of traditional regional cuisines.
I rode for some time in search of a relais. Finally I asked a woman walking along the side of the road with a basket of beets under her arm. She pointed me in the right direction and minutes later I was seated at a nondescript relais drinking a glass of thin, crisp red wine and waiting for my steak.
The steak was superb. Firm in texture, like a fresh peach. With every bite the flavor evolved—from mild and sweet to something deeper and richer. The world floated away. I was one of Odysseus’ oarsmen devouring the sacred cattle of Helios. Mythic.
Transported, I asked the waiter how they made the steak. This, evidently, was not a very intelligent question—his response was to return to the kitchen. I took a few more bites and tried again to engage the waiter, hoping to appeal to his pride.
Our conversation went something like this:
“Wow, this is the best steak I’ve ever eaten in my entire life, ever.”
“I am glad.”
“Um, how is this steak made?”
“It is a steak, Monsieur.”
“Yes, but it is really good steak.”
“Excellent.”
“Um, so why is it so good?”
“Monsieur, it is a steak that has been grilled.”
“Where did you get the steak?”
“It is from Michel-Paul’s farm.”
“Michel-Paul?”
“Yes, a man who raises cows.”
“Um, okay. So what else?”
“It is steak, from a cow. It is cooked with the grill, and seasoned with the salt.”
Aha! I looked at the steak more carefully. Hefty nuggets of opalescent salt were scattered across the surface, glistening in little wells of steak juice, each crystal a fractured composite of smaller crystals, within which were finer crystals yet.
“Where did you get that salt?” I demanded.
“That, Monsieur, is salt from Guérande. The owner’s brother is a salt maker. This is the family’s salt. They have made salt for hundreds of years in the traditional way.”
And there it was. By dumb luck and a simple appreciation for a steak, I had discovered the heart of the restaurant, its connections to neighbors, family, and ancestral ways of life.
After lunch, I called my friends in Le Havre from the pay phone at the back of the restaurant and told them I would not be able to make it that day. Instead, I rode off, fast now, gunning it toward the Brittany coast with the waiter’s directions to find the salt maker.
This experience was one of several that shaped my love and respect for food. I was beginning to understand that all ingredients matter—a lot—and that, in virtually everything we eat, major revelations await the curious. Salt! Who would have thought?
Over the next decades, I discovered that there are multitudes of salts in the world, that their forms are legion, and that the ways to use them are infinite. A sense of never-ending possibility has fueled my interest and frustrated my comprehension. For years after my great roadside discovery, my outlook on salt could have been summed up as, “Wow.” Yet over time my observations and thoughts—and my many conversations with salt makers and cooks—have coalesced into a greater understanding.