Salt
We had friends over for dinner a couple weeks ago - my artichoke and red pepper pizza with an herb salad. While I find the dish to be perfectly seasoned, Marian suggested we put some salt on the table. I said, "Okay, grab that primordial Himalayan sea salt I just bought." In our world, that's a perfectly natural thing to say in conversation or during the course of everyday living. But one of our guests thought it somewhat curious. That's not exactly what she said. What she said was - "Uh, how about some regular old Morton's? I think that would do just fine." But more than WHAT she said, it was HOW she said it that left me feeling a bit pretentious as I stood there with the primordial Himalayan sea salt in my hand.
Truth of the matter is that I don't have any "regular old Morton's." We have Kosher salt. We have Hawaiian salt, with that lovely orange hue, a bag of big crunchy pieces we load into a stainless steel salt grinder. Australian finishing salt. Mediterranean sea salt. Domestic sea salt, "born of the sun-drenched California shores" (that's a direct quote from the label). And, we have chili flavored sea salt flakes from Cyprus. I just bought some Isigny butter with chunks of coarse rock salt peppered throughout the block, and now I'm on the hunt for soy salt, black crystals made from soy sauce that takes three years to brew. A 250 year old process called mushiro-koji.
Call me a snob. It won't be the first time I've heard it. I just think life is too short to sprinkle "regular old Morton's" over everything you eat.
deb
5 Comments
Reader Comments (5)
Pillar of salt, pillar of the community. Hmmm...
The mere fact that you have a stainless steel salt grinder SCREAMS that you're pretentious, honey.
I have this cool Nambe salt grinder with some garlic-infused fleur de sel from Normandy in it. We've used the Himalayan salt before, but now our daily 'default' salt is pretty pink Real Salt from the Great Salt Lake basin--we keep it in a lovely little green salt dish with a mother of pearl salt spoon. No regular old Morton's to be found around here.
I'm going to have to look for that soy salt.
I tell you what good old Morton's is good on - fresh, hot french fries. Mmmmmm......