Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [32]
Because the crystals in traditional salts have formed over a long period of time, they are generally conglomerated into a thick muddle of haphazard chunks. Such salts must be ground mechanically to size—to anywhere from a coarse jumble resembling sel gris to very fine grains and shards.
THE OFF-SEASON
During a good year in northern France, the salt-harvesting season lasts from June to September, though it can be cut short by foul weather. These are months of intense work, as every day the paludier must gather the salt to make way for the following day’s harvest. Any loss of work means a loss of income. Still, while the romance of salt making may focus on the harvest, much of the work on a salt farm is done during the spring, fall, and winter months—the off-season. There is considerable work to do maintaining, repairing, and preparing for the next year.
Establishing a salt field can take years, even decades, of excavating ponds, trenching canals, and shaping borders, embankments, and levees from shifting and flood-prone expanses of silt, clay, and vegetation. Maintaining salt pans is no easier, with the majority of the year spent actively rehabilitating salt fields in preparation for the harvest season. All of this requires the integrity and skill of an artisan, the knowledge and wisdom of a farmer, and the strength and fortitude of a pack mule. Work in the saltworks is effectively 10 percent hydraulic engineer, 10 percent meteorologist, and 80 percent human bulldozer.
Before any work can be done on the salt fields, the year’s harvest must be dealt with. This means hauling thousands of pounds of salt from the side of the salt pans; piling it in a protected, central location; and covering it against the rain. In France, sel gris and traditional salt are usually left outdoors, covered with a tarp, while fleur de sel is brought indoors for safekeeping. In other places, such as Sicily, salt mounds are still made traditionaly, with salt makers meticulously covering each mound with terra-cotta tiles to shield the salt from rain while allowing the moisture in the salt to continue to evaporate.
Every few years, following the harvest, comes some of the heaviest work: draining and cleaning the large vasière. After a year or several years of receiving seawater and holding it for use in salt making, these large ponds can be lively communities of sea life; they can also be laden with silt that has settled from the ocean water. In a step called the poissonnage, which can start as early as October and last through February, the water in the vasière is channeled into the rai (a trench dug around the vasière), where it is allowed to drain and evaporate until little is left, making for a quick harvest of sea breams, mullets, and eels to supplement the paludier’s income as well as his diet.
When the vasière is dried, it is dredged and redug as needed. Staunch traditionalists do all of this by hand. But it’s increasingly common to bring in a mechanical shovel of some sort to do some of the work. Salt makers are intensely proud of their traditional work, and only grudgingly turn to mechanization of any kind. Most that do use machinery insist that it not be allowed inside the ponds themselves, but instead only reach into the ponds with the shovel, avoiding contamination from the machinery.
Next, the rayage involves drying and redigging the vasière and its peripheral channels. There is also the curage de la bondre: the cleaning of the labyrinth of inlet trenches, inlet ponds, and precrystallizing pans, where the mineral and excess clay deposits collect. A rake called a boutoué is used to remove deposits, a manual dredging implement called a lousse à ponter to lift the deposits onto preexisting structural bridges separating ponds (galponts), and a shovel called a boyette to move them from the galponts to shore. Whether as part