Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [33]
These same tools are employed for the next work. The habillage de la saline is essentially hydraulic engineering, landscaping, and sculpting of the earth to restore the elaborate features of a salt field. The salt marshes from which salt fields are formed are natural wonderlands of grasses, reeds, wildflowers, shrubs, and trees that flourish in the pristine marine environment. This plant life is essential to reducing wave and tidal forces on the salt marshes, and to cleaning and keeping in balance the waters used in salt making. Some plants, such as Salicornia and other small shrubs, prevent erosion of the clay banks that define the salt fields. Every year this abundant plant life must be kept from encroaching into the salt pans. During the habillage, unwanted vegetation is removed from the borders and channels of the salt fields, earth at the sides is compacted, and the various ponds are leveled and their respective elevations reestablished.
Pascal Dufour is a paludier on Ile de Ré. He is a lean, strikingly handsome man with sharp blue eyes and tousled hair the color of drying marsh grass. He pauses for a moment to talk to a visitor, balancing the handle of a simouche, a long-handled wooden rake like one that might have been used by a Celtic salt maker 1,500 years ago.
Watching Dufour work is mesmerizing. Standing at the edge of a pan, he gently pulls the long pole of the wooden tool toward him. As the dark, mocha-colored mud lifts up, clear water swirls behind it. With just the right amount of pressure—which appears to be, more or less, no pressure at all—streaks of a paler, grayish, blue-green color appear from the darkness.
For several weeks, Dufour will continue the aplanissement, the masterful craft of leveling the bottom of the crystallizing pans with the simouche. With a sculptor’s sure hand and a farmer’s enduring strength, he carefully rakes off the thin layer of dark mud that develops over the winter, exposing the hard, pale argile beneath. During salt making, the condensed brine in the oeillets may be less than ⅜ inch deep. Even the slightest variation in depth across the twenty-foot expanse of the pan would result in dry spots or deeper pools, reducing the efficiency and rate of salt crystallization. The raked-off mud is left to settle on the side of the oeillets for a day or two to allow the water to drain off. In a process called graissage, the mud is raked and plastered onto the clay-and-mud dikes between the oeillets to redefine them.
“There, you see,” Dufour exclaims as if he has just struck gold. “That is the argile.” He continues across the width of the pan. The progression of work can be seen by looking at the pans Dufour has just completed. The two pans next to him contain banks of goopy dark mud at their borders. Beyond that, the mud has been shoveled from the pans and sculpted with the expertise of a plaster worker onto the levees and banks, which glisten with the dark color of freshly tempered chocolate. Past that, the mud-plaster has dried to the color of graphite, and beyond that it has begun to develop fine cracks as it contracts under the sun. Rainfall, or just the passage of time, will necessitate undertaking this process repeatedly within a single season.
The result of all this exertion is a salt field that appears quite literally clean enough to eat from. In fact, the pans are actually made of the same porcelain clay used in many ceramics (though grayer than the most sought after China porcelain). You have the impression that you should take off your shoes before setting foot there. And sure enough, that is more or less the way the salt maker approaches it.
Staring out at the procession of more than sixty pans making up the salt fields, one wonders: how many people work a salt field like this? The answer: just one. “What I love about this work is its purity,” says Dufour, who began working in the salt fields in 2000. “It is just