Richard Olney

Salt and Pepper

Appears in
Ten Vineyard Lunches
Ten Vineyard Lunches

By Richard Olney

Published 1988

  • About
My kitchen contains no fine salt. I use two coarse sea salts, one grey, the other ‘refined’ (white). The grey salt has the finest flavor but it holds too much moisture to be used in a salt grinder and it throws quite a heavy scum, harmless but unattractive, when added to boiling water. The white salt is reserved for anything that requires seasoning with finely ground salt, for boiling vegetables and for use at the table.

I use a mixture of approximately five parts of black pepper and three parts of white pepper to one of allspice in my pepper grinders. Because of the uneven sizes of the allspice berries, the larger ones must be coarsely broken up in a mortar before being added to the mixture. The omission of pepper in many of the recipes to follow is not an oversight: cooked in a liquid medium, pepper turns bitter and loses the aromatic qualities that are its chief virtues. I never use it in soups, stews, stocks, sauces or in gratins which begin cooking in liquid; I always use it in stuffings, terrines, sausages and pâtés, and often for seasoning meats interiorly or for roasting and grilling. The pepper grinder is always at the table and is meant to be used.