Believe it or not, you really can tell the difference between fleur de sel and bog-standard table salt
It was 1987 when I encountered salt perfectionism – or salt poncery, if you prefer – for the first time. I was watching telly with my uncle, who always stared at it with the most intense concentration, as if he was wondering how they got all those tiny people in that little box, and Keith Floyd was explaining how to salt a dish on the hob. Stand well away from the pan and lob it from a great distance, because that way you’ll be doing it as the sea would: even, subtle, pervasive. It looked a bit profligate at the time, because it went everywhere. But to think that was extravagant, when he was using a bog-standard table salt… We didn’t know the meaning of the word.
Salt snobbery has flourished in lockstep with the renaissance of British cooking. Maldon, the famous Essex white salt, had been around for a hundred and a bit years by the late 80s, but although plenty of people must have used it, they didn’t seem to think it was worth talking about. The idea of salt as a finishing ingredient was a very 90s discovery, but was mainly about texture, with the crystals said to liven up the mouthfeel. Then speciality salts – fleur de sel, maybe the most labour-intensive of the salts, and Himalayan salt, pink and not from the Himalayas but from the Khewra salt mine in Pakistan – became a thing, and it was only natural for some people to say they could taste the difference, and for other people to scoff at them. In fact, you can tell the difference, although you need ideal conditions in which to do so, not least already knowing what it’s supposed to taste like.
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