Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [81]
The enigma of the salt’s colors is counterbalanced by its pedestrian, down-to-earth flavor. The grains are hard as any rock salt, with a faintly sharp but clean taste—milder than Himalayan salts, though with a similar unidimensionality. An overtly vampire-proof dish, like roasted garlic puree on a halibut steak, would be an acceptable volunteer from a flavor standpoint. Rim a cocktail glass with it; scatter it on fish carpaccio; or take it to bed to ogle under the beam of a flashlight, muttering softy in Russian.
Salzburg Rock Salt
ALTERNATE NAME(S): Altaussee Stone; Austrian rock salt; Hallein rock salt; Hallstatt rock salt MAKER(S): various TYPE: rock CRYSTAL: gravel COLOR: russet breadcrumbs FLAVOR: warmed, newly cracked granite MOISTURE: none ORIGIN: Austria SUBSTITUTE(S): Jurassic salt BEST WITH: steamed potatoes; buttered dinner rolls; cheese and nutmeg spätzle
A Neolithic sadness glimmers in the crystals of Salzburg rock salt: the deep light of longing and forgetfulness. Time slides to a halt. Imagine Audrey Hepburn as the cosmically beautiful young princess in Roman Holiday, klieg lights glittering in her murky eyes, poetry lilting off her half-sleeping lips. Tasting the sizzling coolness of Salzburg rock salt, you are her urbane and handsome chaperone, wise in the world but caught off-guard by an apparition who makes the present vanish. Befuddled, mankind’s prehistory looms like a dark cloud over the brief spark of your own life. This all must take place in your imagination, however, as the culturally pregnant Salzburg rock salt offers only a muted spicy mineral flavor and a rock salt’s indifferent hardness.
Salzburg rock salt and other more or less identical rock salts formerly or presently produced by the mines of Hallstatt, Hallein, and other towns in the Salzkammergut region can be named rather freely, but all the colorful, natural-looking rock salts you come across there are more or less identical. This is convenient, because finding any at all can be challenging. Solution mining has replaced rock-salt mining over time as the veins of 80 percent or purer salt were depleted, leaving only clay-dense veins of just 40 percent salt open for exploitation.
A stag horn pickax found in 1838 suggests that salt may have been mined in the region in 5000 BCE, and Celtic settlers appear to have mined salt since the fifteenth century BCE, hauling oxhide bags laden with rock salt from the depths of the earth on their backs or on pack animals. Salt was harvested for local use and trade abroad from the salt springs in the region by Celtic settlers at least since 700 BCE, and rock salt pulled from veins in the mountains brought a sustained population boom to the area well before the early Middle Ages. Salt also brought war, resulting in Bavaria and other states taking control of the mines’ wealth; the poverty of the salt miners became proverbial. Altaussee is one of the few old mines still making rock salt, a relict of the Celts who first settled there and saw beauty in stones of salt.
Timbuktu Salt
ALTERNATE NAME(S): Sel de l’Azalaï; Mali salt, Sahara desert salt MAKER(S): various TYPE: rock CRYSTAL: tailings of dune sand COLOR: lightbulb FLAVOR: clean; warm stones MOISTURE: none ORIGIN: Mali SUBSTITUTE(S): Jurassic salt BEST WITH: curries; lamb; couscous; fresh fruit; salt-preserving lemons
Nature writes its poetry in water and salt, the two elements that have brought so much human suffering and happiness. Like suffering and happiness, water and salt can also be lost to time. Two hundred and twenty million years ago, much of what makes up the Sahara Desert today was an ocean.
Beneath the desert sands in northern Mali, the sea’s petrified remnants