They've sat with us at nearly every table, a pair that's partnered most of the meals ever cooked in western kitchens. A Yin and Yang, darkness and light.
The importance of salt is crystal clear. Life wouldn't exist without it and if it did, it would taste gross and weird.
But out of all the herbs and spices on the culinary roster, how did this ground up gray stuff become the go-to spice of life? Seriously, why not salt and turmeric or salt and mustard, salt and cumin, salt and nutmeg, salt and coriander, salt and paprika, salt and cinnamon, salt and allspice, salt and cloves.
Salt, or specifically sodium chloride. It's the only rock that we eat, the unlikely joining of a poisonous gas and an explosive-metal and when paired with water it provides both the incubator and ingredients for life.
We use sodium and chloride ions to keep our cells inflated, to regulate blood pressure and convey electrical nerve impulses throughout our body. To maintain this, we need to consume about six grams of sodium chloride every day.
So salt's culinary and cultural value is no surprise. Its history could fill a book, and it has.
A great book by the way. Have you guys read the book Salt: A World History?
Early hunter-gatherer societies got all the salt needed from their animal diet. To this day the Masai people of East Africa get theirs from drinking the blood of their livestock.
But as human society is shifted to growing and eating plants, salt became something you either found or traded for. The earliest sites of salt harvesting date to at least 6,000 BC in China and Europe.
There's salt in most of the blue wet stuff covering earth once you boil away or evaporate all that pesky H2O, but there's pure sodium chloride in Earth's crust, if you can find it. Following animal trails led us to natural salt licks and some of these became our first highways.
