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Salt is the taste of sweat, tears and a day at the beach. Salt brought us good health, it brought us bacalao, herring preservation, yummy longlasting breads and that never-sinking feeling of flying when one is bathing in places like the Dead Sea and Central Asia’s wonderous Issyk-Kul Lake.

Due to scarce sunlight, in Northern Europe salt is being extracted from water by heating seawater over a wood fire instead of letting sunlight do the job of evaporation as we know it from the fleur de sel productions in Brittany and Portugal. In my opionion, the salt produced this way does keep the flaky crunchiness and meltable softness that is characteristic of sun generated sea salts, too.

The other day at Læsø–a small Danish island with a saline Medieval past–a strong wind was blowing, and this is what the huge basin looked like when the vapor blew away, returning to the ocean in an eternal cycle of on-going transformation.

And what remains once the water is gone? Tasty, flaky salt crystals that not only served as a means of preservation in pre-frigidaire days, but also served as taste modifier and medication throughout thousands of years all over the world.

PS. Recommended reading: Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt. A World History”

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