My Salt Looks Like Sugar

When I was a kid, my mom would tell me, “Its ok to cry, because saltwater is a cure for everything. There’s salt water in out tears, our sweat, in the sea, and on the towels we use to clean our wounds.”

The first time I knowingly witnessed the miracle of the most important mineral on Earth, I was 7. My mom rung out a cotton rag over a bowl of kosher salt and warm water and placed it gingerly on my knees after I had fallen on the road racing my brother and his friends with my new scooter. I’d lost the race and my crying had added insult to injury. It burned something mean, but I felt much better after, and no scars were left to prove my embarrassment.

The second time I witnessed the miracle, I was 10. My father had brought in a catch of baby squid, he pulled it out of a metal bowl and held a forkful real close to my mouth and joked, “come on, try it.”

I turned my head and grimaced. He laughed real hard – a hardy kind of laugh – and tossed the tiny creature on the wooden cutting board in his restaurant, chopped the squid to make it look like onion rings, then tossed it in a pan with parsley, and lemon.

SIZZLE, SIZZLE. CRACK. I watched the show of flames and listened to that symphony of sounds and smelled that garden of that kitchen.

It was bright and then dark like an theatre show. Then, it was on a plate in front of my eyes as my dad served it up to me like the rich customers who’d come to the restaurant later that night. He drizzled some dark, sticky sauce on top and took a pinch of sel gris from a little, white bowl and made it snow a grey winter over his creation. “How about now?” said dad as he held out a shiny, silver fork to me.

I took thee fork with half delight and half disgust, bit a small bite of the ringed food, and found myself on the other side of destiny. It was delicious.

That was the moment that defined my life. The sea is my home and that of my ancestors. I could fish and swim and smell a storm and feel a hurricane coming; but until that moment, I didn’t know her, not really.

“Do you know where this salt comes from, Cas?” My dad asked.

“Uh-uh,” I said, my mouth full of savory squishiness of the squid, my eyes wide with curiosity.

“It comes from the ocean, in Brittany…in France,” he smiled.

I looked on with great interest as I continued to gobble up my delicious, three-star meal.

“But we can make our own, right here,” he chortled.

I swallowed and blurted in disbelief: “We can make salt on an island?”

“The very best place to make salt is on an island,” he said, taking a bite of my squid and smiling as if he’d just hatched the best plan on Earth…and in a way, it was.

The very next weekend, my dad took me and my brother to the beach out in one of the cays. We packed our little fishing boat with 5-gallon glass bottles and filled them up with sea water. Then we took them to my dad’s friend, Mr. Rasta’s, hut and boiled the water in a big metal pot over a real fire for the entire day.

I watched as my dad and Mr. Rasta slowly stirred and skimmed and boiled until at last, after my brother and I had fallen asleep under an umbrella after eating an uncountable number of mangos. I woke up to my dad waving me over to see a pile of greyish-white crystals spread across the kitchen table. I was given a small shovel and tasked with spooning the precious mineral into a reused plastic grocery bag.

In the corner of the kitchen Mr. Rasta was fixing up some ackee and saltfish. He came over grabbed a handful of my salt with a wink and went back to his business at the stove. About 15 minutes later, all the salt was in the bag and Mr. Rasta and my dad were nodding at something secretly delicious in the corner. I wanted to know what was so good.

“Come here,” they invited me.

Then, Mr. Rasta, leaned in real close and said, nodding his head, “We be de salt o’ de Earth, but dis ‘er be the salt o’ de sea.”

A long wooden spoon was lifted to my lips. The flavor of the salt reached my brain like it was fire on a train. I didn’t know it at the time, but my love for food and cooking and the sea would mingle into the common thread my life’s work in that single, salty spoonful of fish.

Years later, after I finished university, when I didn’t know what to do with my life or how to make money, I returned to the sea and to the kitchen. I was done with busy cities and pollution after several years of working in a corporate skyscraper and wanted to turn my love of food into a career that would support marine health – or at least do no harm to it – and fulfill my passion for cooking.

I was walking on the beach one day, hopping I could find a vender selling conch fritters when I saw Mr. Rasta’s old hut. He wasn’t running it anymore, but after I bought some fried fish from the new owners, I turned around and saw a teenage boy selling salt and pepper shakers, and then I knew what I would do. I would make sea salt.

For two years, I toiled in my home kitchen dragging in sea water by the gallons and boiling it down and refining it and drying it in the sun, then the oven – no that made it too gritty – then in the sun again, until I developed the perfect recipe for small batches of sea salt. But that wasn’t quite enough.

I’d made body scrubs and seasoning rubs and sampled it successfully to local restaurants to try. My friends and family love it, as well as the customers and chefs of the restaurants. But how can I make it more versatile? It works well on meats and preserving fish and in soups, however, it is by no means a finishing salt for everyone. For that I would need to make a bigger, more consistent batch.

To make this salt more accessible requires a business license, a professional kitchen and industrial-sized equipment. But just as the sea brought me my path and fed my passion, I know it too will provide a solution for this obstacle as well.

The first time someone called me to ask for more of my sea salt, I cried, and I remembered what my mom used to tell me about saltwater being a cure-all. I had surely sweated in my work to produce the sea salt, the sea had calmed my soul when I needed respite from a busy life, and I cried tears of joy at having found it. And, although my salt looks like sugar, its sweetness lies not in the taste, but in the making of it.

It is now my time to sprinkle a pinch of salt on the earth and in the water and on your plate. I hope you’ll enjoy the meal that the sea and I have prepared!