Salt

I’VE SHARED THIS STORY BEFORE, BUT it bears repeating since the truth of it feels so obvious to me now. Yet it arrived like a rap on the skull with a cop’s nightstick. It was winter of 1998, and I’d just begun working with Thomas Keller on The French Laundry Cookbook. We were talking a lot about food and cooking, and I asked what would seem to be an obvious question but is one I don’t often see chefs asked: “What’s the most important thing for a cook to know?”