Salt to taste

THE FOOD CLUB

I've just returned from a holiday in Goa, where the one aspect that has struck me forcefully is salt, rather than the sun, sand, beaches or feni. Traditional households all over the state use no table salt at all, but only grainy, gritty, grey salt crystals that come from the sea.

The elegant Market Grill restaurant at Park Hyatt Goa Resort and Spa where I dined on the first evening of my holiday used pounded sea salt to flavour the squid, prawns and fish of my mixed seafood grill platter.

The occasional mouthful yielded a gentle crunch of the salt, which never happens with table salt. Executive chef Daniel Patterson is quite right when he claims that his tribe goes hunting for local ingredients and misses out on the most obvious ones.

On my last evening at Taj Exotica, I helped myself to pinches of sea salt as I waited for dinner to arrive. Sea salt melts softly on the tongue, and has none of the harshness of table salt.

Executive chef Gary Palm has been so fascinated with the local salt that bowls of it take the place of the more conventional salt cruet. Palm worked for a decade in Brittany, from where the world's most famous and pricey salt "" fleur de sel "" comes, which began his lifelong fascination with the world's most basic condiment.

He remembers his stint in Japan, where a sushi chef carved out salt from a pink rock and ground it in a tiny mortar and pestle before adding it to the sushi.

Chef Manu Mohindra of Under One Roof tells me that rock salt is found in any quarry that has traces of sodium in it. "Maybe millions of years ago, these hills or mountains lay under the sea, but now they're considered the purest form of salt, which is why you're allowed to use only sendha namak during Navratra fasts."

On the other hand, kosher salt for the Jewish community is sea salt. Salt mining from rocks would appear to predate the process of salt panning from marshes or the sea, if you take into account the phrase "salt of the earth".

The colour of rock can range from light pink to dark brown, depending on the other trace elements in it, and that in turn depends on where it is found, rather like sea salt that is available in various hues, depending on which body of water it comes from.

Fleur de sel is slightly off-white and reminds me of snowflakes, while Maldon salt from across the Channel looks like powdery pyramids.

Rock salt is used as much as a condiment as it is as a medicine: most of the people who buy what is known in Kashmir as Pakistani noon, do so for warm baths to heal sprains, just as elderly Goans hit the beaches in May to "take the waters" for entirely medicinal purposes.

Finally, not quite salt are two chemicals: saltpetre, used in smoked meats and fish, and monosodium glutamate, which, Mohindra says, can make a dish horrendously salty, if used in large quantities.