Fashionable salt

"I love the impulsiveness of measuring it out by hand, the crunch between the fingers, the sense of live culinary instinct as you throw it into a pan. And then there's the way it looks – salt flakes are beautiful. Who'd choose to top their salad with dodgy looking white powder over these gleaming savoury flecks?" Mina Holland in The Guardian

I was reading a not very good book (for book group) and in passing it mentioned that seasoned salt was fashionable. Which got me to thinking it might make a brief article for the blog. So here we are - and the salts above were on sale in the market in Le Lavandou, France. We visited it this summer. They all look so tempting and interesting that I almost bought some but I resisted.

I'm guessing it's a way for salt manufacturer's to get people to buy salt - which they (and we) know is basically bad for you. I have not cooked with salt for years, even though, in fact, it is necessary for some cooking processes. But I do find myself reaching for the salt grinder - yes we have a salt grinder, we don't just buy table salt - to add a touch of salt to my food. I just can't seem to give it up.

Initially they tried with various gourmet 'plain' salts. Rock salt crystals, for which you needed the aforesaid grinder, and then sea salt which was somehow more upmarket and better - from specific places like Maldon (in England) and the Camargue. Sea salt is softer and finer than rock salt, and fleur du sel is the top of the sea salts. It is sometimes just served in a dish and sprinkled on your food. I have some sea salt crystals in a beautiful little bowl (a gift) which are flakes rather than crystal. They curl up at the edges and look wonderful.

Then we moved to more exotic coloured salts - Himalayan pink salt and black salt - also from the Himalayas but also Cyprus and Hawaii. And of course they all cost more. And yes they are basically the same product as Home Brand table salt. Yes you are being ripped off = but that's entirely your decision.

Do they taste any different though? Does salt just taste like salt? Well the gourmets would say not - as these coloured salts have various minerals in them that must give them a flavour.

So then we moved on to flavoured salt - and I confess I have succumbed and bought a grinder of chilli salt, because my husband has decided that he can no longer eat chilli. To be fair to it - it is marketed as salt, and therefore has more salt than anything else - so the chilli flavour is not very marked. But it seems you can make flavoured salts with just about anything and there are endless web sites telling you how to do it - home-made Christmas presents anyone?

When I was a child there was just salt - that was bought in a great big block. Chunks of this were carved off, placed between sheets of greaseproof paper and bashed with a rolling pin until it was fine enough to use. At least this is what my grandmother did - we had enormous fun bashing it and rolling it to a fine powder, which was then put in salt cellars. I don't think my mother bought the blocks - she bought it in packets already ground up and then put it in the salt cellar. There was no other kind of salt.

Although there must have been. Maldon and the Camargue have been producing sea salt since forever - but maybe they ground it all up into fine table salt.

And here is the salt pan in the Camargue - where most of the good stuff comes from, taken on holiday a couple of years ago. And yes - it really was that colour.