Remember when we were kids and salt was a homogenous, monochromatic entity? When the only interesting additive was iodine, that sworn enemy of goiter, and cheap garlic salt was exotic?
I knew those days were over a few years ago when Kara, my wife-chef, brought home half a cup of dirty-looking gray salt from a catering job and told me I had to check with her before using it, apparently afraid that I would de-ice the driveway with it during the next frost.
Now we can hardly face the dawn without our flaky fleur de sel and its many micro-varietals from the marshes of Guerande, France; without our Celtic salt, hand-harvested with wooden rakes on the Brittany coast; without our coral-pink Alaea sea salt enriched with volcanic Hawaiian clay; without our pearly Indian kala namak.
A bit ironic, isn't it? "Salt," a word that has long connoted earthiness, humility, even coarseness, has become the trendy object of desire for would-be home gourmets.
As Mark Kurlansky writes in "Salt: A World History," "Modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt."
But if the search for obscure grains has reached absurd, salt-mine depths, the result is fun. Some of these far-flung sodium crystals are truly distinctive and delicious, as a little experimentation demonstrates.
The first thing you should know about fancy salts is that, unless you have Shaq's monthly food budget, they are not for all dishes. Don't sprinkle Dead Sea salt on your fast-food French fries. Don't use that artisanal Gulf of Maine rock in your pot of chili. It just doesn't make enough of a difference to justify the expense.
If you do cook with a coarse salt, remember that, like the kosher variety, the size and irregularity of the grains mean that they tend to have more air between them. So it might take two teaspoons of artisanal salt to equal one teaspoon of Morton's version.
Specialty salts are for finishing dishes at the table. You can observe them in their colorful and sharp-angled splendor, feel them crunch between your privileged teeth and truly savor their flavor.
The simplest and best presentation is a plate of vegetables or fruit and a small bowl of superior salt. In the summer you have tomatoes or corn or avocados or watermelon, in the winter, radishes. Baked potatoes beg for salt year-round. A conservative pinch--just a few crystals, really--can turn a turnip into a first course.
