You think you know a person, and then you move into her house for a few weeks to keep the lights on and take in the mail while she's gone, and you realize: Salt. This person has a crush on salt. First you find kosher salt, in the big red box. Then a jar of pink-tinged Hawaiian red clay salt next to a white box of flaky English Maldon salt, the kind that Nigella Lawson likes to sprinkle over her soft-boiled Italian egg every morning. On the counter is a vase-shaped bottle of French sel gris, crunchy, chunky crystals with a whiff of seaweed, and a tiny, face-cream-sized jar of saffron salt. Next to the stove, two ceramic dishes stand ready to deliver up a pinch or two to the soup or scrambled eggs.
On the top shelf, there's even a cylinder of good old supermarket Morton's salt, dosed with iodine and still with the little rain-slickered girl on the dark-blue wrapper. (At least the freezer offers the girly reassurance of chocolate-peanut butter ice cream.) In the refrigerator, the crush veers over to umami, the Japanese-named "fifth taste" of mouth-watering savoriness: capers (2 jars), a wedge of real Parmesan, a chunk of smoked Gouda, soy sauce, cornichons, bread-and-butter pickles. In the pantry, canned trout filets and canned sardines, regular and smoked.
Short of licking one's fingers and working up a case-of-beer thirst, what to do with this grand bouffe of briny delights? There’s an old Jewish tradition that a guest always brings bread and salt to bless a new house. So what better way to make a house a home, just for a little while, than chewy breadsticks sparkling with any number of salts? And when the house’s owner comes back, she’ll find a bouquet of the same fresh salted bread waiting to welcome her back home.
Easy Salty Breadsticks