Salt

For cooking, my mother and grandmother used coarse salt from the salt pans around Bombay or from the coastal areas of Maharashtra and Gujarat. This is a wet, gray salt sold in gunnysacks at traditional groceries. For the table, there was a saltcellar or a shaker with fine salt that never poured because of Bombay’s humidity. I use coarse sea salt for most cooking, but play with many other salts for finishing a dish. When we travel, I always look for the local salt. It’s the basic goût de terroir. We all need to do this to keep these small saltworks from being squeezed out of existence by commercial salt conglomerates trying to make cooks in the developing world feel that their indigenous salt is inferior.