Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [31]
This is heavy work. A single pass of the salt rake can gather several pounds of coarse sel gris crystals that have to be pushed and pulled across the twenty-foot floor of the salt pans, lifted into piles, drained, then shoveled and transported to consolidated piles, dried to the desired degree, and finally protected and stored for sale later.
Though not as physically strenuous, harvesting fleur de sel requires more skill, as well as vigilance. When the weather is warm enough and a light breeze tousles the shimmering waters of the oeillet in the afternoon, a frail bloom of salt appears on the surface. Fleur de sel should be a beautiful silvery pink when first harvested, and contain virtually no particulate clay. Harvesting it involves very gently lifting the crystals from the surface of the pan without disturbing the bottom. The distance separating the fleur de sel at the surface of the pan and the gray clay at the bottom is less than ⅜ inch, and one slip of the rake will disturb the gray porcelain clay at the bottom, ruining the fleur de sel.
Making matters more difficult, the time during which fleur de sel can be harvested is fleeting. Fleur de sel appears at different times in different climates. Some salt makers in very accommodating climates can allow fleur de sel to form all afternoon and all evening, and then harvest a thick crust of it from the surface in the morning. In Europe, the best fleur de sel generally must be harvested in the afternoon, because by the following morning it will have settled to the bottom of the pan and transformed to sel gris. And the following day may fail to bring the fleur de sel at all. The paludiers must rush to the fields and try to harvest it all before night falls. Fleur de sel harvesting is sort of like picking peaches before a freeze: every moment counts, but any clumsiness will ruin the effort. To see a salt harvester rake fleur de sel is to witness in action a superb physical exactitude combined with endurance and composure.
THE FEMININE ART OF SALT HARVESTING
The role of women in the traditional household of northern France’s salt-making communities is as diverse and integral as anywhere. In the past, women not only attended to the needs of family and community, they also were the primary workers in the small gardens and farms that brought in much of the food. But the skills attributed to women were needed in the salt fields as well.
Fleur de sel was and is an essential cash crop for the salt maker, fetching about ten times the price of sel gris, and for the paludiers its quality is also a point of pride. In addition to the usual brute physical strength required to harvest salt, the harvest of fleur de sel holds at least one additional requisite: precision.
Harvesting without disturbing the bottom involves very gently lifting the crystals from the surface of the pan. In the closely knit community of the traditional Brittany paludiers, this precision labor was provided by women. Many modern-day paludiers recognize this, acknowledging that women can be faster and more precise than men in the harvest of fleur de sel. Women continue to work in the salt fields of northern France, providing a unique bridge to a time when women managed both economic and domestic responsibilities as a traditional way of life.
Traditional Salt
Traditional salt is similar to sel gris in its formation, but because it is allowed to accumulate for a longer period of time, far more of it is harvested at a time. The crust of traditional salt, rich in magnesium and trace minerals, called “cake,” can be several inches thick lying on the bottom of the crystallization pans. Harvesting it is the equivalent of removing the topsoil from an entire farm, by hand. It is heavy work, and some artisan salt makers do use mechanical help for the harvest, dragging a plow from the edge of the crystallizers with a winch or tractor or,