Once upon a time, salt was just salt. It was the stuff in shakers and canisters, the gustatory equivalent of the treble dial. You used more, or you used less. Whether it was a little girl with an umbrella, a toss over the left shoulder to ward off bad luck, or a nontaster’s affront to the chef, it was all just salt.

This was more than 20 years ago, but well after people learned that there might be finer coffee than Medaglia D’Oro in a can. Maybe the first inkling was the coarse salt on the rim of a margarita, or a salad invigorated by sparks of La Baleine, or a virgin bite of chocolate sprinkled with fleur de sel. For Mark Bitterman, the author of Salted and the coiner of the term selmelier (which so far seems to have been applied just to Bitterman), the epiphany was a transcendent steak at a relais in northern France in 1986. He deduced that the difference-maker was the rock salt provided by the owner’s brother, a saltmaker in Guérande in Brittany. Bitterman came to learn, as all chefs now have, that before salt was just salt—before it was industrialized and homogenized—it was a regional and idiosyncratic ingredient, perhaps the quintessential one, precisely because it was so universal. You could tell salts apart, prefer one to another, and pair them with different foods. You could acquire a salt vocabulary, tell salt stories. If you could be a snob about coffee, beer, butter, peppers, and pot, why not sodium chloride?

A box of Maldon, something you can find in kitchens across the globe Photo by James Mollison

I was slower to catch on. I’d encountered a certain variant everywhere: delicate flakes of sea salt, in ramekins or little wooden bowls, in snug neo-rustic restaurants with one-syllable names (Prune, Hearth, Salt, et al.) or at the kind of rooftop barbecues where people served mead cocktails and put watermelon in salad. It was a pleasure to pinch it between forefinger and thumb, or absentmindedly dab at it and taste a few flecks, like a narc testing a confiscated drug shipment. It had a sublime effect on a tomato or a pork chop. But I didn’t think of it as a particular kind. It was just “the fancy salt.”

Then I got wise. On a kitchen shelf at home, there was a small box adorned with the Royal Warrant of the Queen of England and some Edwardian-sounding patter in small print, attesting to the “curious crystals of unusual purity” contained within. The brand was Maldon—Maldon Sea Salt Flakes. It came from a 135-year-old family-owned salt works on the southeast coast of England. My wife had been buying it for years.