Having spent the past 20 years in Paris, where he owns Spring restaurant, he also used a variety of French salt, in addition to the English stuff. “Nothing else has that flaky quality,” Daniel Rose, chef-partner at Le Coucou in New York, told me. There’s a quick savory zing that doesn’t overpower or overstay-“an ephemeral saltiness,” as Bitterman describes it. As for the taste, Maldon is considered less bitter, less salty than other salts. It works best as a finishing salt-one sprinkles it on vegetables, butter, caramel, or grilled meat, just before serving. It has the look of something valuable and hard-won, a delicacy that has crossed deserts on camels. (No one really measures out salt.) The pyramid shape, no bigger than a tab of acid, keeps it from caking. When cooks talk about Maldon, they inevitably mention the feel of the flakes between the fingers, the pleasing tactility of the pinch. If you could be a snob about coffee, beer, butter, peppers, and pot, why not sodium chloride? You could acquire a salt vocabulary, tell salt stories. You could tell salts apart, prefer one to another, and pair them with different foods. Bitterman came to learn, as all chefs now have, that before salt was just salt-before it was industrialized and homogenized-it was a regional and idiosyncratic ingredient, perhaps the quintessential one, precisely because it was so universal. He deduced that the difference-maker was the rock salt provided by the owner’s brother, a saltmaker in Guérande in Brittany. For Mark Bitterman, the author of Salted and the coiner of the term selmelier (which so far seems to have been applied just to Bitterman), the epiphany was a transcendent steak at a relais in northern France in 1986.
Maybe the first inkling was the coarse salt on the rim of a margarita, or a salad invigorated by sparks of La Baleine, or a virgin bite of chocolate sprinkled with fleur de sel. This was more than 20 years ago, but well after people learned that there might be finer coffee than Medaglia D’Oro in a can. Whether it was a little girl with an umbrella, a toss over the left shoulder to ward off bad luck, or a nontaster’s affront to the chef, it was all just salt. It was the stuff in shakers and canisters, the gustatory equivalent of the treble dial.
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