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Salt and Pepper
Short Story
Daily, we go through about 10lbs of salt. Not really. We do consume quite a bit of it. Like the DNA testing box turned to dog and dust dander collection device, I also wait to be tested on what the sodium content of my blood work. Years go by. I think it has to do with our struggles with keeping the wrong size salt in the salt grinder.
As a point of fact, if the grains of salt are too small, they slide through the grinder without any action to be had on your behalf. Maybe, the advanced adult in you would decide just need to use a salt shaker. It turns out when I was wandering through the aisles at Westerly Supermarket in midtown Manhattan, I didn’t consider the months long consequences to what that day’s purchase would ignite. It turned out that in that brief moment at the store I couldn’t find the chunky Himalayan salt I usually purchase. To my rushed dismay, there were too many different grades in front of me: fine and medium.
No problem, I thought. Medium. Oh, and look—hmm, this other company proclaimes a “medium” grind as well. Surely, two different brands of medium grinds would yield one chunky enough to require the extra grinding my mill could provide once I got home.
It’s been ongoing ten months now, on account that I have two different brands of medium grind, Himalayan salts. Not only are they naturally fortified with different occurring minerals, they also naturally slide out effortlessly through the holes as soon as you fill the well from the dispenser.
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And yet… It took almost a year of struggling with the bizarre and utterly uselessness of the salt grinder to stop using it altogether. Yes, in a final fit, I measuredly shoved the mill to the back of the useless cuboard section of the kitchen. SaltGate could come to its ridiculous end. Yet, next to the pepper mill is the salt pot. This one holds a different brand of Himalayan salt than what was in the mill. No two salts are truly alike, are they? Next to the salt pot, is a salt dispenser, holding a very soft, pillowy celtic salt from France. The dispenser comes with two very handy sections of dispensing the rather fine granual— so handy! A few holes and a half moon shaped slot that can be controlled by twisting the plastic swivel one the face. The amount of the soft powder within can be regulated to one’s desire of output.
Amazing.
No need for a salt mill under such circumstances with all of this ease: a salt pot and a dispenser. I have even used the half moon section to pour some of the silky stuff out in the salt pot, where I mix it with some Himalayan. Each dissolve in water at different speeds, flavoring liquids uniquely. Talk about an abundance of nutrients and minerals running around willy–nilly in the kitchen. Probably more than any reasonable person could stand in an ordinary kitchen setting. Very convenient for a pot of boiling water awaiting pasta or rice.
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Perhaps when both companies decided on texture and the meanings of texture and salt, that they were thinking of it in terms of “on the scale of finely ground salts, it’s a medium grind” as opposed to “on the scale of medium grind salts, it would be very fine indeed”. Now I’ve got it all sorted however, and the cooking in the kitchen has moved forward amicably and favorably. I have a perfectly good salt grinder in storage, and a serviceable looking salt dispenser next to a salt pot near the stove, that may or may not feature two salts mixed together. Two items nonetheless, more than adequately serving the original purpose of regulating the dispensing of medium fine salt through the option of punctured holes, a half moon slot or a spoon, all without leaving a wasted pile behind.
© June 2020, by Isabel Alvear