Flower of Salt
A Mother’s Day reflection on the pandemic’s toll on women.
Flower of salt (fleur de sel). | Image credit: David Kadlec, stock photo, 123rf.com.
A friend of mine recently returned from quarantining in France and brought me a present — a small jar of fleur de sel.
Fleur de sel, directly translated into English as “flower of salt,” is a rare and expensive form of sea salt hand-harvested mainly in Brittany, along the northern Atlantic coast of France. Chefs call fleur de sel the “caviar of salts” for its unrefined purity.
The crystals are fine and light, with a distinctive pyramid shape that looks like a flower. They have a delicate flavor and high concentration of minerals, which makes them a perfect finishing salt to add texture, a burst of flavor, or visual charm to a dish. It’s perfect over eggs or simple roasted fish or a green leafy salad. My daughter and I sprinkled a pinch into a baked chocolate dessert, which was so good we made it again a few days later. There’s an art to the sprinkling: a three-finger pinch, then a circular motion high above the plate while crushing the crystals between the fingertips and letting them fall.
The more I sprinkled, the more I mused on this rough mineral, this earthly deposit. It’s just salt, after all. A rock. A substance produced by a reaction of an acid with a base, specifically sodium and chloride. Aka, NaCl. On the other hand, salt is the only family of rocks eaten by humans. Its history is ancient, magical, fraught, and loaded with metaphorical significance. In the case of “flower of salt,” it also blooms.
It’s this juxtaposition of a rock and a bloom that got me thinking about our mothers.
Women have shouldered the burden of the pandemic. According to Oxfam, moms lost out on $800 billion last year from job cuts or leaving careers to care for others during the pandemic. Mothers carry an “invisible load” and have served as our societal rock, but society has treated them as dispensable.
It’s time to let mothers bloom. Let them flower in real terms.
As Reshma Sajuany of The Marshall Plan for Moms states in her New York Times op-ed piece:
Mother’s Day is an American tradition. So is the trivialization of motherhood. If we want to celebrate the former, we have to put an end to the latter. More than flowers and saccharine cards, moms deserve an acknowledgment of the fact that motherhood in America is broken — and a plan to fix it.
• • •
evaporation
Like other edible salts, the production of fleur de sel relies on evaporation.
Salty ocean water from the Atlantic is carefully guided through a complex series of estuaries into shallow marshes, called oeilettes, where the seawater evaporates naturally in the sunshine.
Unlike regular table salt and most other sea salts, which are produced on an industrial scale and the salt beds allowed to dry up (producing a dry grain, rather than a crystal), fleur de sel ponds are carefully maintained to a mere half-inch depth so that the developing salt crystals stay moist.
Optimal weather conditions are required: lots of sunshine, gentle winds, and low humidity. The slightest movement, like a bird or a breeze, can cause the salt crystals to sink.
Then, like a delicate flower, the crystals bloom and float on the surface, forming a thin crust of salt that looks like ice.
The process is at once beautiful and grueling.
In the best of times, like fleur de sel, mothers rise to the surface and bloom within a half-inch of total evaporation.
We lose ourselves in our children, our partner, the daily rush. It is a burden we largely welcome, breathing in our caregiving roles as instinctively as we breathe in the air.
Still, it’s a delicate balancing act. An unexpected wind, and you sink to the bottom of the marsh.
For over a year, the pandemic has been gusting through our lives, exposing the impossible demands mothers have been facing with work, childcare, and housework.
Forced to choose between work and caring for young children, the pandemic has pushed 2.3 million women out of the workforce. Black mothers, Hispanic mothers, and single mothers have been among the hardest hit. Food insecurity is at an all-time high due to reduced incomes from lost jobs.
Mined of their emotional and physical reserves, mothers are in crisis.
Without action, we are allowing the souls of our mothers to totally evaporate.
• • •
raking
There will be a lot to sift and skim through as we emerge from the pandemic.
As individuals, we may shed aspects of our pre-Covid selves, having learned something new about ourselves during quarantine. Some of us may jump headfirst into a less restricted life while others of us may be more anxious.
Either way, re-entry will likely require further reflection and adjustments.
We must be gentle with ourselves.
Fleur de sel must be gently hand-harvested by salt farmers, les paludiers, after the salt crystals surface at the top. They rake the salt carefully with a special tool to only pick up the purest, lightest salt flakes from the upper layers.
It didn’t come as a surprise to learn that for a long time, only women were allowed to do the raking.
Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History, writes:
In the evenings when a dry wind caused the crystals to form on the surface of the water, the women would use long poles with a board on the end to skim the surface and bring in fleur de sel. This was women’s work, because the fleur de sel salt was much lighter and because it was believed the work required a woman’s delicate touch, though the dainty work included carrying on their heads baskets of the light salt weighing ninety pounds.”
“Paludière” (1843), François Hippolyte Lalaisse | Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée | Image credit: Pubic Domain via Wikipedia
While gender equality has since prevailed, harvesting fleur de sel is still an artisanal craft, practiced at an extremely local level in a traditional manner.
Production is limited to ensure quality and to respect the conditions that allow the salt to thrive.
From start to finish, the undertaking is quite charming.
To navigate the narrow paths out of the swamps, for example, wheel barrels only first began to be used in the harvest of fleur de sel in 1932. Even today, the only mechanical part of the process is the truck that drives the salt to the packaging facility close by.
In a way, we’ve treated mothers with the steam shovels, dump trucks, and conveyor belts associated with industrial-scale sea salt production. We dreamily desire boutique-quality, but with a mass-market strategy.
In a 2012 New York Times article, a present-day salt farmer described his work like this:
“You have to be Zen here,” Mr. Mercier said as he worked the marshes. “You need a strong arm and a velvet touch. The sound of the water when you slap the surface, the contact with the salt, the feel of the sun, the wind: it is all very sensual.”
This gentleman could just as easily have been describing the art of motherhood if it weren’t for the magical thinking our society employs around mothers and motherhood.
Fleur de sel is magical, but it’s not magic.
This “caviar of salts” is bolstered by a centuries-long tradition and a community and culture that values and protects that tradition. Thanks to systems-in-place, skilled work, a lot of patience, and a village, something beautiful is created.
The production of fleur de sel is championed at a structural, cultural, and personal level.
By contrast, we’ve held mothers up to an ideal — the woman who can have it all (and do it all) — without valuing and protecting them. The system is broken, and the pandemic is breaking women.
As we all do our own metaphorical raking, it is incumbent on Americans to reevaluate the support our society offers mothers.
It’s time to finally solve for unpaid work, lack of childcare, lost jobs, pay gaps, paid leave, and the mental stress of keeping a family fed, clothed, educated, and healthy in a pandemic.
A mom is worth her salt.
• • •
surfacing
The pandemic isn’t over, but we’re surfacing.
One of the most alluring moments in the production of fleur de sel is when the crystals rise to the top of the water, indicating optional weather, mastery of technique, and attentiveness.
Considered one of the purest salts on earth, fleur de sel costs approximately 100 times as much as table salt.
The thing is, even when we sink a little, we’re still great.
It’s about showing up, not perfection.
The salt that sinks to the bottom of the oeilettes is called sel gris (grey salt) because it is raked more vigorously against the dense clay that lines the marshes. This is where sel gris gets its color, but also its distinctive flavor and high magnesium content. The flavor is further enhanced by tiny particles of algae and plankton in the water.
Grey salt is also highly valued as a premium gourmet salt. One American vendor describes the impact of sel de gris as having a “deep, mineral crunch with enough moisture to ensure lasting power on the heartiest and moistest foods.”
So, moms? Whenever you’re doubting yourself or feel that you're sinking, remember: You are deep, with lasting power. You will surface.
You are a rock, and you are an exotic bloom.
You are flower of salt.
May society do better by you in a post-pandemic world.
• • •
Pablo Neruda, the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote in his poem, “Ode to Salt”:
I know
you won't
believe me
but
it sings
salt sings
So, too, mothers of the world and of history.
You sing.
Mothers sing.
