James Beard on the importance of salt

Discovering a new seasoning is one of the greatest pleasures a food lover can have. The first time you taste it, you immediately start imagining all of the dishes in which you could use the flavor. It gets tucked away in your mental spice box, ready to be pulled out at just the right moment.

The more you cook and discover new spices and herbs, the bigger this toolkit gets. The downside to having all of these flavors at your disposal is that it can lead you to overlook the more basic seasonings. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of how important the simplest of these can be, as this essay by James Beard about salt demonstrates. 

Beard describes the major types of salt (that which comes from the sea and the other that originates deep in the earth), and even gives you instructions how to make your own sea salt. If you happen to vacation at a beach, you should give it a try sometime. Noting that salt is added to nearly everey type of food we eat, from savory to sweet and everything in between, Beard opines that salt “is one of our greatest culinary gifts.”