Starter

My friend Karin and I moved to Boston at about the same time, and of all the things this fellow Tex-pat and I missed the most, at the top of the list was the spicy, smoky, black-flecked salsa at La Fogata restaurant in San Antonio, where Karin grew up and where we both loved to visit when we were in college in nearby Austin. In those days, La Fogata would sell you the stuff to go, but only if you brought your own container. Karin would fly back to Boston with a gallon jug in her carry-on, something that wouldn’t go over too well with the TSA anymore. Nowadays, you can order the salsa online, but it’s not quite the same, no doubt due to the preservatives required to make it shelf stable. After I saw a take on the recipe at SpiceLines.com, I started experimenting and developed my own. In addition to gracing the top of Tacos de Huevos (page 87) and going into Spicy Glazed Mini Meatloaf (page 65), the pungent, garlicky condiment is good on grilled pork chops or steak. Of course, it can be served as an appetizer with tortilla chips. The recipe doubles and triples easily.

Eggs barely hard-cooked, dolloped with housemade mayo: without this simple, affordable bistro food, I would surely have perished under a bridge on the banks of the glittering Seine. A few bucks buys you a seat at a rickety table on a busy street for as long as you wish, leaving you free to jot remembrances and ideas as you soak up the sights, sounds, and smells of Paris. A crust of baguette dipped in the heavenly silkiness of real mayonnaise, a bite of egg, a sip of crisp lager, and you will want for little else in life, ever again, so long as you live. The waiter will scrupulously not talk to you. The beauty who spares you a cigarette flashes only a fleeting smile before vanishing. You are free, wonderfully alone. Most of my jotted remembrances and ideas revolved around my unending astonishment at just how good real mayonnaise can be. To emphasize the distinction between the ethereal wholesomeness of handmade mayo and the gelatinous goop that comes from a jar, I still refer to it by its breathy French name—just say it: oeuf mayonnaise. Homemade mayonnaise normally calls for a sprinkle of salt, but dissolving the salt in the sauce is a missed opportunity. Sprinkling little rubies of coarse alaea salt over a plop of mayonnaise reveals the clandestine romance of salt and sauce, animating this inscrutable dish, drawing attention to its splendors, and lending a glimpse of Paris to your day.

Crusty, chewy, salty dinner rolls whose textures and flavors play wonderfully off the slowly melting pat of sweet cream butter you place inside: these are the perfect accompaniment to the salad or cheese course, and will provide an irresistible distraction from the main course of prime rib or leg of lamb. If you have children, keep the rolls on reserve until after the kids say they can’t eat another bit of their meat or veggies. Then sit back and behold how they magically create enough room for a marathon runner’s share of salty-yeasty carbs.

Peas are so perfect on their own, it’s a wonder it ever occurred to anyone to cook them in the first place. But fortunately someone did. A trillion peas later, after endless refinements on the art of making a pea more perfect than a pea, the French Laundry created its cold pea soup, a spring rain cloud of viridian sugars skimming a truffled forest. But before Thomas Keller could make his soup, we had to grow up watching Julia Child chiding us about making the blanching water incredibly hot, and salting it, and treating the pea with the utmost love and care. It was Julia Child who rescued cooked peas from the ignominy of creamed cafeteria concoctions, restored their preciousness, and gave them back to us like so many incandescent pearls rolled from the fair hand of nature. A drop of saffron cream shot through with a taut bolt of salt cradles and charges this blanched pea with its own electricity.

Behind the jubilant liquid tomato smile of pasta margherita lies an intellect of herbs and garlic. The one covering for the other is a seduction of sorts, an invitation that propriety prevents you from accepting too eagerly. Sprinkle your margherita with the crystalline sweetness of Fiore di Cervia, the fine salt from the balmy Adriatic flats south of Ravenna, and marvel as the tart-sweet play of tomato and pasta asserts itself. Ennobled by the salt’s fruity warmth, the sauce is freed of its ties to the herbs that first defined it. Eyes open, head borne aloft, your margherita is as beautiful in body as in spirit.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we burned bones in the fire and then broke them open to slather our food (and faces and bodies) in the butter-fine marrow. Scooped from roasted veal bones and spread on a wedge of crusty bread, marrow is so rich and flavorful that it threatens to overwhelm. And that’s where the salt comes in. The strident mineral tones of a coarse sel gris penetrate through the fatty richness, letting fly its myriad dimensions—like cutting a ruby from a hunk of Burmese rock. If marrow hadn’t been created by nature, it would have been necessary to invent it just to have a food that strikes so squarely at the core of the eating experience. If it weren’t for sel gris, nature’s felicity would all be for naught.

Impress your Jewish grandma with gravlax, or just impress yourself. Actually, my Nana preferred the cold-smoked cousin, lox, but gravlax is an incredibly easy, positively delicious way to cure salmon. The name comes from any number of Nordic fish dishes inspired by the openly morbid technique of burying in the ground (grave) your salmon (lax) with some salt cure. I like this dish because it yields a particularly moist, delicate, and lightly salted gravlax, since the salinity of the salt block does not migrate as readily into the fish flesh as a packed cure of loose salt. Also, because you don’t need plates and weights, and because the salt blocks can be reused over and over again, the method boasts a certain elegance and economy of tools. See page 267 for more about salt blocks.

If there is any dish that could be served with every meal, every day, morning, noon, and night, it’s butter leaf lettuce salad. Eggs Benedict with butter leaf lettuce salad; cheeseburgers with butter leaf lettuce salad; pasta alla carbonara with butter leaf lettuce salad. Or, for a snack, just butter leaf lettuce salad. Its acidic elegance balances out the heartiness of any meal. The trick is the dressing. Making your own vinaigrette is among the biggest single improvements you can do in the kitchen—it becomes a distillation of your aesthetic defined by acid, oil, sweetness, and salt. Jennifer’s mastery of the vinaigrette has done more to promote the advancement of cuisine in our house than anything else: the shallots discover a plump, inner sweetness in the vinegar; the olive oil expresses its spicy-green spirit in response to the pepper; and the mustard emulsifies so that the dressing coats the lettuce in silkiness. Then the Maldon, strewn across the surface of the dressed salad—a glittering fencework of flakes perched along the crests and vales of lettuce—snaps like static electricity to stimulate the palate—a flash of pungency that illuminates everything so quickly and clearly that it is gone before you have time to fully comprehend what happened. This is Maldon’s raison d’etre: to reveal and amplify, then vanish, leaving you with only the desire for another bite.

Whether in food or in adventure, our great life-affirming moments often come when nature and sentience find themselves suddenly on intimate terms. Gulping a fresh oyster from the half-shell can be as exhilarating as sailing headlong into white-capped seas with only the song of steel-cold air in the rigging to keep you company. This is why I never tire of the fall season’s promise for new discoveries in oysters. I recently discovered the Totten Inlet Virginicas from the southern Puget Sound: minerally, fresh, and clean with a consistently firm meaty texture. Introducing Shinkai deep sea salt to the Totten was an opportunity for a culinary adventure I could not pass up. The mineral flavors of the oysters amplify the abundant steely flavors already apparent in the salt, and bring to light glints of sweetness and kelp that you might never find on your own. A drop of mignonette and a pinch of Shinkai deep sea salt; the sea god Neptune never had better.

Sometimes ingredients make strange bedfellows. Chocolate and cheese are not the most natural mates, but when the cheese is a heady, acidic, barnyard-fresh goat’s milk cheese and the chocolate is bits of roasted cocoa bean, unsweetened and compact as an espresso bean, unexpected things happen. You get something more. But you can’t quite tell what. The flavors square off, then shift, then subvert one another. Then they take a pause. The air is thick with tension, but nothing stirs. Suddenly, like a gunshot comes the massive crunch of Cyprus black flake sea salt and everything is movement. It all becomes clear in an instant: a dish that’s as comforting as grandma’s chicken potpie and yet uncivilly decadent. . . . A secret pleasure of serving this dish is watching even the most well-bred guest slyly supplement each bite with an added pinch of black salt crystals.

Imagine a garden. In it are Black Spanish, Burpee, Champion, Cherry Queen, China Rose, Early Scarlet Globe, Easter Egg, French Breakfast, Fuego, Icicle, Plum Purple, Snow Belle, Tama— all radishes. The best way to eat all of them, to savor their isothiocyanate heat, to luxuriate in their woody density, is with butter and salt. The silken texture of the butter plays off the radishes’ crunch, and the two take a honeymoon together, visiting the sultry destinations of spiciness and cream. Fleur de sel is the key. Its moistness helps its crystals ride out the voyage long enough for the radish and butter to make their cquaintance in your mouth. It also lends mineral richness and texture to both. Fleur de sel, a pat of butter, and a radish— a poem penned by summer.

With a feast of raw meat, the only things separating a gritty fifth-century encampment at the foothills of the Altai Mountains in Kazakhstan and a bistro in Paris, Buenos Aires, New York, or Tokyo are the rimmings. In the modern case, these might involve a glowing egg yolk cradled in a caldera of flesh, slivers of oily anchovy, the pickled plumpness of capers—an interplay of texture and flavor, of raw and cured, oils and acids, aromatics and salt. The spectral freshness and crackling crunch of Halen Môn penetrates through this wonderful exchange and substantiates it—footnotes in the secret life your mind leads during the most intense moments of pleasure at the table.

Salt that is everywhere is nowhere. Burying food in layers of salted homogeneity gives you nothing so much as a lot of salt. Yes, salt can be used to subjugate other flavors, bending them to an evil imperial will, enslaving them to the offensive goal of not offending anyone. The dark lords of homogenous salting hold cocktail parties where they try to keep everybody in the usual safe conversational ruts—children, sprinkler systems, geopolitics—while you, a rebel with your feathered hairdo or cinnamon buns attached to the sides of your head, try to bring light, freedom, and individual expression to the sensory galaxy. Allow your ingredients to converse, each reflecting upon what it has to say before sharing with the others. Heavily salted breads and presalted butter have possibly done more than any other two foods to reduce the net amount of mirth and pleasure experienced on earth. Unsalt them, and then set them free with your salt. A small amount of salt can be added to round out the bread’s toasty flavors without detracting from the salt’s romp through fields of buttered grain.