Salt
(Sodium Chloride)
Sodium chloride--a mineral which crystallizes in small transparent cubes, melts at 803 degrees centigrade, is soluble in both hot and cold water, and conducts a current of electricity-- was the first salt to be discovered by man.
It is found most everywhere in nature. The sea. The land. Even in the urine and perspiration of animals...man included. Sea water is evaporated, and rock salt is mined--so important is salt for the flavor of food, the needs of the diet, and even digestion (by increasing the hydrochloric acid content of digestive fluids). Animals have worn ineradicable trails in their quest for salt licks. Men of primitive tribes have reportedly sold their wives and children into slavery for it.
Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, dessicates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was willing to labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and mythic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its links with experience of the sacred. --Margaret Visser
Arab traders carved great salt trading routes around the known world from earliest times. Its trans-Saharan trade, for example, began on the Mediterranean coast, where salt was dried in salt pans, and went by caravan, oasis to oasis, along the Sahara desert to southern forests--returning with gold dust, ivory, goat skins, and slaves.
The two kinds of salt are sea salt and rock salt. Sea salt is the only mineral condiment that man adds to food--and vegetarians need more of it than carnivores. This is true of animals as well as man: herbivorous animals crave salt while carnivorous ones ignore it. Complete abstinence from salt has, apparently, not been found possible, even in the most austere monastic orders.
For the purposes of cooking, salts are graded as follows:
- Rock salt, which is unrefined, is grey in color and rife with impurities. Some of them quite important. Its arsenic, for example, is a valuable mineral in such small quantities--encouraging one to use it for cooking, though not for the table.
- Table salt, which is ground and refined rock salt--and can fortified with iodine and treated with magnesium carbonate (lime) to prevent clumping.
- Sea salt, which is evaporated or distilled from sea water. Unrefined, it is called sel gris, or gray salt. In Finisterre Brittany, one can buy small expensive packets of "Les Algues D'Ouessant" that combine sea salt with a variety of sea algaes--and that immediately transport the diner in spirit to the seaside.
- Kosher salt, which is course refined rock salt with the lime.
- Curing salt, which is 94% salt and 6% sodium nitrate--usually dyed pink to differentiate it from regular salt. It's used for charcuterie items, especially those being cold smoked. Sometimes potassium nitrate is used--that's the infamous saltpeter, folks!