Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [6]
Salt is not bad for you. On the contrary, it is very good for you. It is right and proper to use as much salt as you want so long as you are the one salting your food.
Honoring salt and using it well begins with a glimpse at the cultural and economic centrality of salt. It then explores salt’s natural complexity and the artisanship behind it. With this in hand, we need a vocabulary and unifying framework for appreciating all kinds of salt from all parts of the world. Last, we can look at a variety of approaches, some traditional and some novel, to using salt in the ways that best suit you. An appreciation for salt—traditionally made in particular—changes our world for the better, leading to better tasting food, more empowered consumers, healthier populations, more sustainable food production, preserved natural environments, and a restored sense of belonging.
Salt is the prism through which the ingredients, dishes, and people of the world can be experienced in all their fullness and variety. Sprinkle the parchment-fine flakes of Maldon sea salt on homegrown butter leaf lettuce dressed in a shallot vinaigrette, and you will experience a chlorophyll dynamo that strums at the very heart of nature. Let fall dark crystals of Cyprus black flake salt on medallions of seared pork and plantains and you will feel the turgid rush of Incan discovery. Grind smoked salt on hand-churned ice cream and you will trade in your house for an igloo. Salt sates the alchemist’s desire, transmuting food to fantasy.
HISTORY: FIRST BITE
With all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt. —Leviticus 2:13
Imagine that first person. Driven from the safety of her clan by the pangs of a sharp and terrible hunger, she takes the forbidden path. She pricks her ears for the sound of a panther stalking from behind, but hears only her own hushed breathing. Her bare feet slip occasionally on the moss that grows on the damp roots and fallen trees. But then she hears a soft roar ahead—not of an animal but of something else.… Suddenly she emerges from the jungle shadows into the fierce open light of the seashore. She shields her eyes for a moment with her hand, allowing the bright water to take shape before her, then quickly negotiates the jagged rocks to the water, mindful of the sharp pavement of barnacles under her bare feet. At the water’s edge she glances over her shoulder once again to be sure she hasn’t been pursued, then plunges, her golden form rippling through the cool, clear water, then vanishing. Clouds reflecting on the surface of the water scatter into a million points of light for a moment, then ripple back into focus. All is quiet beneath the surge of the tide. Then she surfaces, swims easily to the rocky shore, and climbs out. Salivating in anticipation, she cuts a piece of abalone from its pearly dome with a shard of broken shell and is about to eat when she spies a crust of white crystals sparkling at the bottom of an evaporated pool by her side.
Her mind races.
She has tasted this stuff before, licking at the silver lacework evaporated from her own perspiration after running through the tall savanna grasses. She knows its intimacy with her body, having tasted it in the blood licked from a scraped knee. She knows it from the waters through which she just swam. She reaches over and rubs the chunk of abalone in the salt, and bites.
We were innovative foragers, opportunistic in the extreme, relentlessly tasting everything in the environment to evaluate its nutritional potential; salting was something altogether new, perhaps the first seasoning ever applied, and by definition the most potent one. The food historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto said culture begins when the raw gets cooked because it is cooking that brings us together. But really, why would it not have started eons before the taming of fire, with that first primal cuisine, raw but wonderfully seasoned.
The first salt intentionally eaten with food would have startled the taste of