Salty
“Does this book mention that salt is poisonous, unfit for human consumption?" popped up when I typed ‘Salt: a World History by Mark Kurlansky’ into my search engine. “You'd be a corpse without salt,” was one salty reply. I’d made the mistake of defaulting to Google, forgetting how useless it is these days unless you want to simulate coming up on acid, where everything feels ever-so-slightly mad. Need one para on salt’s chemical composition followed by a swift segue into Matthew’s account of the Beatitudes or 4000 words on why salt is an inorganic compound and therefore poisonous yet ‘bio-available salt’ is not? Google is your friend.
We need salt.
Wild animals unable to meet their sodium requirements via ‘bioavailable’ salt travel to naturally occurring salt licks. So do insects. Some bees are partial to salty human sweat. Plants don’t need salt but all animals do. Salt generally causes stress to plants. I watched my grandfather pour salt over weeds on a sunny day; they’d wither and blacken by nightfall. (Don’t do this!)
I adore salt.
Having extremely low blood pressure is a convenient excuse and reason for behaving like a bison at a salt lick. I eat it as is, in tiny amounts; the sensations are wonderful. A single flake of fleur de sel placed on the dorsal side of the tongue will swell and open languorously when it meets saliva, before dissolving and exciting receptor cells. The chorda tympani, a branching facial nerve that sounds like a dish you’d make on high days and holidays, transmits these excited salty taste messages. My chorda tympani is a lively little beast that requires constant attention, and trying to write about salt without resembling a bloodhound at a Sunday roast is almost impossible. The temptation to dot my tongue with crystals as I edit is irresistible. My mouth is watering.
I’d planned to finish an entirely different post, but yesterday I roasted/baked Cyprus potatoes after rubbing their skins with olive oil and a sweet mustard salt blend from Pinches Suffolk, and told people about them this morning on Bluesky. Hence this post.
As per, here are some links to great writing about salt.
‘Salt: The Paradoxical Philosopher's Stone of Autonomic Medicine’ is a beautifully titled academic literature review.
Jim Dixon on the beauty of sea salt.
Salt is essential to life but it’s also symphonic. Let Samin Nosrat show you why.
How did saltfish from the Shetlands become one of Europe’s staple foods? This book by John Godlad explains it all.
Twenty years of salt production underpins this beautiful cookbook.
Jeffrey Steingarten’s 2001 essay Salt Chic in It Must Have Been Something I Ate interrogates the world of rare and ‘designer’ salts, asking if they are worth the money and hype. “Nothing in the food world today is chicer than salt and despite an excess of God-given modesty, I must admit I got there very, very early,” he says. “Food fans who once brought back unusual olive oils to their friends back home now come bearing bags of exotic salts.” Guilty. An aside: far too many male (mainly) English food writers are so influenced by Steingarten, Jim Harrison and Bourdain they’ve turned into a weak dilute of all three. Just stop.
And here’s a piece on terroir as applied to salt in Modern Farmer.
The role of salt in colonised Australia via ABC Radio National. And how halophytes used by Australia’s Indigenous People might be useful as salt substitutes. More on this, here.
A brief history of salt, via Time.
A children’s book about a boy’s journey to deliver salt across the Sahara desert and a feature about the Saharan salt diggers trying to keep this ancient trade alive.
Some western museums have in their collections, saltcellars carved from Ivory depicting Portuguese figures. This one was made by an ivory carver in Benin. Here’s another one, described as a ‘crossing of cultures’. More information here.
A very interesting question that demands a revisit: was there a salt trade among pre-contact Indigenous Australians?
In 2022 Jaya Saxena asked Has the salt rim cocktail gone too far? Today I learned Maldon Salt holds a cocktail competition. Last year’s winner was a Maldon Gimlet No3 by Gian Maria Ciardulli.
The sweet mustard salt blend used on my potatoes is from Pinches Salt in Suffolk. I pay full price for their products.
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This is beautiful and utile. I love the “bison at a salt lick.”
Thank you so much for the link to the book about the Tuareg salt trade! I lived in Niger for a long time a billion years ago. (That salty gimlet sounds pretty amazing)