It is well known that food flavouring is a discovery that dates as far back as the Neolithic era. Salt was initially used by chance but, when it was first deliberately added to food, it caused the second culinary revolution. The first was the cooking of food.
There are many stories about the importance of salt in the past that sometimes go unnoticed but that endorse the significance of this ancient condiment. In classical Greece, Homer mentions it as something divine, and tells us that the Trojan heroes always ate meat seasoned only with salt.
Salt was a symbol of hospitality in Rome. Jesus said to the Apostles: you are the salt of the Earth. The Church has used salt in baptism as a symbol of incorruptibility. The word salary comes from the Latin, because Roman troops were given part of their pay in salt. And the Phoenicians in Spain taught much about salt, especially as an element of conservation, mainly for salting fish.
Such was the importance of salt that it was subjected to taxes, controlled by the most powerful in the land, was the cause of wars and stimulated extensive trade.
Moreover, the word sauce or salsa, which defines a more or less liquid dressing, either hot or cold, accompanying a dish or used to cook it, comes from the Latin: salat. That is, it tells us that salt is the basic ingredient of all sauces. A very beautiful saying goes: if meat, fish or rice and other foods are the prose element of meals, spices and condiments are their poetry.
But to understand the history of salt, we must remember that besides preserving food out of necessity, salt is, above all, a food flavouring, which adds strength to the taste of the food it seasons and also provides the body with sodium and chlorine, helping to maintain the balance of body fluids.
As San Isidoro de Sevilla said: ‘There is nothing more necessary than salt and sun.’ Today, in the marketplace there are a countless number of salts: sea or land (from salt works or mines), coarse and fine, rocky, or as delicate as flowers, white or grey, natural or mixed with other aromatic elements, flavoured, delicate or powerful, and more or less rich in nutrients.
Without doubt, the most outstanding are: English Maldon sea salt, coarse Baleine sea salt from the French Camargue (highly fluoridated and iodized), and salt from Guérande. Of the latter, located in Brittany, there are two types: the grey, medium grains rich in magnesium, and fleur de sel, which is white and harvested by hand.
As for English Maldon sea salt (from Essex), it is the flower of exquisite salts, which like great harvests, doesn’t occur every year, since it needs special weather conditions favouring the deposit of a thin layer of flat crystals on saline waters, that visually remind us of frozen flakes.
But there are other curious salts: smoked, which gives the quirky touch of smoke without the hassle of the usual process. There is also a curious salt, sold as samphire, off the French Opal coast, which is nothing but twigs of the most evocative sea vegetable, salicornia. In the same vein, we have very fashionable gomasio, a mixture of salt with dried seaweed. And, of course, an almost endless range of salts with flavours and aromas, ranging from orange, dried tomato, truffle, vanilla or green tea, and even more curious wine, olives, squid or ham.
Today more than ever, salt undoubtedly adds poetry to meals, even the most prosaic.
