Salt (67 page)

F
ASHIONABLE PEOPLE ARE
now divided into two camps. One is passionate about being healthy and eating less salt, the other is passionate about salt. The argument has been continuing since ancient times between those who think salt is healthy and those who think it is unhealthy. They both may be right. Unarguably, the body needs salt. A great deal of research indicates a relationship between high blood pressure and cardiovascular problems and eating large quantities of salt.
The Yellow Emperors Classic of Internal Medicine
, a Chinese book from the first or second century
A.D.
, warned that salt can cause high blood pressure, which can lead to strokes. Not coincidently, one of the fatal symptoms of salt deficiency is low blood pressure. But there are also studies that refute a link between high salt intake and high blood pressure. Some studies even indicate that low-salt diets are unhealthy. The kidneys store excess sodium, and in theory someone with healthy kidneys could eat excessive salt with impunity. Sweating and urination, by design, relieve the body of salt excesses. The problem lies in the balance of sodium and potassium. But it seems that an imbalance cannot be adjusted simply by eating more or less potassium-rich vegetables versus sodium-rich salt.

The theoretical debate continues, but clinical evidence shows that people who consume large quantities of salt are not as healthy as those who don’t.

Meanwhile, fashionable chefs are cooking with more salt—or more noticeable salt. It has become stylish to serve food on a bed of salt, cook it in a crust of salt, make it crunchy with lots of large crystals. More than 1,000 years ago, the Chinese were cooking in a salt crust. Chicken cooked in a crust of salt is an ancient recipe attributed to the Cantonese, though it may have originated with a south China mountain people known as the Hakka. Today, fish is cooked this way in Italy, France, Spain, and many other places. Even a fish farmer with a small restaurant by the Dead Sea in Israel cooks his fish in a salt crust. The salt seals, in the same way that cooking in clay does, but it does not make the fish or chicken salty. French chefs sometimes leave the fish unscaled to avoid salting the flesh.

In the old Guérande salt port of Le Croisic, in a 1615 thick-beamed, stone waterfront building where merchants used to buy salt for the moored ships, is a restaurant called Le Bretagne. It is one of many restaurants in the Guérande area that specializes in sea bass baked in a salt crust. It is evident from the quantity of salt used that this is a style of cooking either for the very rich or for a modern age of inexpensive salt.

BAR EN CROUTE DE SEL

(SEA BASS IN SALT CRUST)

Choose a sea bass of about two pounds for two people.

Five to seven pounds of
sel de Guérande
[gray salt from Guérande]

Five black peppercorns, thyme, rosemary, tarragon, and fennel

Clean the fish. Do not scale it.

Fill the stomach with the herbs and a few turns of a pepper mill.

Place the fish on a bed of coarse salt in an ovenware dish. Cover the fish with a layer of salt slightly less than an inch thick. Pat it down and moisten it with a spray humidifier.

Bake it in the oven and decorate with seaweed.—
Michèle and Pierre Coïc, Le Bretagne, Le Croisic

A
FTER THOUSANDS OF
years of struggle to make salt white and of even grain, affluent people will now pay more for salts that are odd shapes and colors. In the late eighteenth century, British captain James Cook reported that the Hawaiians made excellent salt. However, he complained that on the island of Atooi, today known as Kauai, the salt was brown and dirty. The cause of this was a tradition of mixing the salt with a local volcanic red clay,
alaea
, which is brick red from a high iron content. Cook did not seem to understand that this “dirty salt” was not intended to be table salt. The salt was made for ritual blessings and religious feasts. It was also used to preserve marlin and as a medicine, especially for purification during periods of fasting. But today this dirty salt, “alaea red salt,” is widely available, sought after by fine chefs and would be gourmets.

Gray salts, black salts, salts with any visible impurities are sought out and marketed for their colors, even though the tint usually means the presence of dirt. Like the peasants in Sichuan, many consumers distrust modern factory salt. They would rather have a little mud than iodine, magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, or other additives, some of which are merely imagined. The New Cheshire Salt Works, which does not add iodine, adds sodium hexacyanoferrate II as an anticaking agent. There is no evidence that such chemicals are harmful, and, in the case of iodine, a great deal of evidence that it is healthy. Now there is talk of adding flouride to salt for its health benefits. But modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.

Then, too, many people do not like Morton’s idea of making all salt the same. Uniformity was a remarkable innovation in its day, but it was so successful that today consumers seem to be excited by any salt that is different.

Among the big winners in this new salt fashion are the old-time producers from the Bay of Bourgneuf. These were the salts that Colbert had complained could be so much more sellable if only the producers would learn to make them whiter. Their impurities had always been a drawback. As recently as 1911, the French pharmacist Francis Marre, warned in his book
Défendez votre estomac contre les fraudes alimentaires
, “In general the first thing to do [when buying salt] is to make sure it is white, this would give you the best assurance that it is a pure product.” The problem with the Bay of Bourgneuf salt was the dark umber clay at the bottom of the ponds. Particles got caught in the square sodium chloride crystals. But once again, Colbert was wrong. Today’s consumers will pay high prices for the gray salt of Guérande, Noirmoutier, or Ile de Ré.

Many French traditions vanished in the 1980s, including kigsall, the salted pork of Guérande. In Noirmoutier, the salt business almost died between 1986 and 1994, with only twenty-one salt makers left. In 1995, a group of locals and off-islanders formed a salt cooperative to bring back traditional salt making, and now almost 160 work on the island’s salt ponds and market their salt through the cooperative. Guérande, Noirmoutier, and Ile de Ré have all attracted French people longing to return to agriculture. One-third of the salt makers on Noirmoutier are younger than thirty-five.

A nineteenth-century postcard of salt rakers harvesting in the Guérande region.
Collection of Gildas Buron, Musée des Marais Salants, Batz-sur-Mer

The paludiers of Guérande used to be locals in that part of Brittany who passed on the work from father to son. But today only 20 percent of the 300 paludiers are local. After two generations of French leaving their villages and their agricultural way of life and moving to the cities, there is a significant minority doing the reverse. They leave Paris to raise ducks in Périgord or oysters on the Atlantic. And some come to Brittany to rake salt in a way that is so traditional that fiberglass poles and rubber tires for wheelbarrows are the only discernible changes in technology since before the Revolution.

Unlike with the big companies, here the future is quality, not quantity. They command high prices for their salt because it is a product that is handmade and traditional in a world increasingly hungry for a sense of artisans. They make two kinds of salt, the gray salt and fleur de sel. The light, brittle fleur de sel crystals are ten times more expensive than costly gray salt. French salt makers do battle in court over what is true fleur de sel. Guérande has sued Aigues-Mortes—all the more suspect since it was bought by “the Americans”—over its use of the term.

But fleur de sel is not unique to Brittany, and may be as old as making sea salt. In the second century
B.C.
, Cato gave instructions for making fleur de sel in
De agricultura:

Fill a broken-necked amphora with clean water, place in the sun. Suspend in it a strainer of ordinary salt. Agitate and refill repeatedly; do this several times a day until salt remains two days undissolved. A test: drop in a dried anchovy or an egg. If it floats, the brine is suitable for steeping meat, cheese or fish for salting. Put out this brine in pans or baking dishes in the sun, and leave in the sun until crystallized. This gives you “flower of salt.” When the sky is cloudy, and at night, put indoors; put in the sun daily when the sun shines.

Skimming the ponds at Guérande for fleur de sel as the sun sets, paludiers can look up and see the silhouette of the Moorish stone steeple of Saint-Guénolé in Batz-sur-Mer across the grassy wetlands. Near the church is the distinct smell of butter and a long line of people in front of the bakery, Biscuits Saint-Guénolé. The bakery was started in the 1920s with the recipes of a woman who sold cakes in the neighborhood. Breton baking is about salt and butter. Although modern refrigeration has made unsalted butter easily available, Bretons insist that salt brings out the flavor of butter.

Kouing amann
, the name of one of the most famous cakes of the region, is Celtic for “piece of butter.” Gérard Jadeau, who runs the shop, says that in his kouing amann, butter makes up half of the total ingredients. It is a buttery dough, layered like puff pastry, rolled flat. Butter is spread on it. Then it is rolled and sliced, and the slices are arranged in a baking dish and put in the oven.

It is not easy to get this much butter in a cake. The trick is a moderate oven. Too hot, and the butter will separate; too cool, and the butter will keep the dough from baking. But even with this quantity of butter, Breton bakers will say that what gives the cake its buttery flavor is the saltiness.

Jadeau, between ovens, wrote down on the back of his business card the following recipe for his popular butter cookies: