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Greek yogurt, crème fraîche, or caramel ice cream, for serving (optional)

4 two-finger pinches Maine apple smoked salt

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Put the peaches, stem side down, in a baking dish large enough to hold the peaches without allowing them to touch one another. Poke each peach with a fork several times to keep them from bursting.

In a small saucepan, bring the water, sugar, and cinnamon to a boil over high heat. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the bourbon, vanilla, and butter. Return the pan to low heat and simmer until the butter melts. Remove and discard the cinnamon pieces. Spoon the sauce over the peaches.

Roast the peaches for 10 minutes, then remove the dish from the oven and brush the peaches with syrup from the bottom of the dish. Return the dish to the oven and roast until the peaches are just tender enough to pierce with a fork, about 25 minutes more. Let cool for at least 15 minutes before serving.

Serve one peach per person, with some syrup spooned over the top. Serve with a dollop of Greek yogurt or crème fraîche or a scoop of caramel ice cream, if desired. Sprinkle a two-finger pinch of the salt over each serving.

SALTING AT THE EDGE

A man cannot become an atheist merely by wishing it —Napoleon Bonaparte

Salt can save a meal, breathing pep into blandness, coaxing firm flesh from flab, giving form to the most elusive aromas—which is why it is one of the more abused ingredients in all cooking. Salt it a lot, the logic goes, and it will taste better. But too much salt is like listening to the car stereo with the volume turned up to the point where windows rattle in houses as you drive by: the intensity of the experience drowns out the substance of it.

Usually the result of heavy salting is food that jabs aggressively at your taste buds—or, if you’re like me, makes your throat tingle and your eyeballs bulge. But sometimes the result is something else altogether: intense, maddening, raging flavor.

Standing next to a saucepot, the chef flings salt dash by dash into a sauce, descrying with each salting the shifting landscape of flavors in the concentrated liquid—lavender, perhaps, then lemon zest, then unexpected notes of chocolate and cardamom, finishing with the dark fruit notes of red wine. Thick steam and silky liquid trace the dish’s entire story across the palate. Up, up, up: more and more salt falls from the chef’s hand, carefully, judiciously, thoughtfully, then presto! Like a pickax striking solid gold, the sauce strikes that singular chord, an incontrovertible harmonic blend. Perfection. The dish is done.

Whether it is a pomegranate-basil sauce or fried salami and celery root salad or a wild hare and habanero etouffé, salt can be used to bring wildly diverse taste sensations together. For some cooks working in certain styles with certain recipes, it can take a heck of a lot of salt to get to this point. I call this “salting at the edge.”

There are tricks to using salt with such wild abandon. First, don’t use it with wild abandon. Add each crystal as you would another bit of pressure on the gas pedal. Push too far and your meal is a wreck. Second, don’t do this too often. Many foods—and virtually all good fresh foods—are tasty the way they are. “Often” is obviously a highly subjective term. Which brings us to the third and most important point. Don’t make salting heavily a thematic part of your cooking. It’s a well-marked path to more flavor, sure, but it is also a rote and over-relied upon approach to seasoning. Adding a lot of salt often gets in the way of a better understanding of both the quality ingredients and the sound techniques that are the foundation of any good meal. Making every bite buzz alarmingly with salt can make your diners feel bewildered or overpowered, or worse, manipulated. But, boy, is salting at the edge amazing when it works.

FRYING

I won’t eat anything green —Kurt Cobain

Take almost any food and drop it into hot fat, and the results are delicious. All cooking techniques that use fat or oil for heat transfer are a form of frying.