I opened this book equal with parts trepidation and enthusiasm. Trepidation stemmed from concern that we may not need another cookbook focused on a single ingredient. Was this going to be a gimmicky exercise in overreaching brought on by a current trend in publishing? Enthusiasm stemmed from my love of salt and the pre-existing respect I had for its power. Experiences — and experiments — in the kitchen had taught me that sound cooking techniques are, so often, linked to salt. What could be better than a book dedicated to “salting wisely and well, with recipes”? The book opens with the following quote from the great chef Thomas Keller (of French Laundry fame): “The ability to salt food is the single most important skill in cooking.” With that as a reverent jumping off point, the authors, Fritz Gubler and David Glynn (with the assistance of Nutritional Science academic, Dr. Russell Keast), assert that to “deprive ourselves of the magic that salt brings to food would be something close to madness” (9) and then proceed to give us a love letter to salt via the information, cooking techniques, and recipes that this well-researched, intelligently conceptualized book contains. The book is divided into four sections — Salt Wise, The Salt Kitchen, The Story of Salt, and Resources — that form the building blocks of the salt literacy for which the authors advocate. They want us to use salt enthusiastically, but with a deep understanding and respect for the ingredient and its proper use. “Many of the health issues faced by the Western world," they argue, "are attributable to the things we eat, and if we make our own food, we can more easily control what goes into our bodies.” (38) Readers are urged to beware processed food, since that is where salt lurks, often virtually invisible and in surprising places, in unhealthy quantities. You only need to examine the sodium content of a can or Tetra pack of commercial soup to confirm this. One goal of this book is to rid the world of salt shakers and eliminate the distance they create between ingredient and user. The Salt Wise section is dedicated to acquainting the reader with what it means to salt wisely and this is done primarily through educating the palate and the fingertips to be able to distinguish between different salts. How does the texture, colour, size of grain, weight, moisture level, and, of course, taste vary? The authors recommend having a minimum of four types of salt on hand as a general rule — a natural sea salt for general use, a fine sea salt or iodized table salt for baking, a soft mineral salt for meat dishes, and a fleur de sel or other fine salt for finishing dishes. By way of providing instructions for a guided tasting, they suggest one prepare a range of foods (such as suggest tomato, hard-boiled egg, melon, cucumber, grapefruit, rare beef, and chocolate) in order to compare the effects that different salts have on flavour. I appreciated this breakdown of things and had some fun comparing my workhorse natural sea salt and beloved delicate Maldon flakes with newly-acquired Murray River pink salt and crunchy sel gris The next section, entitled The Salt Kitchen, introduces recipes as well as cooking, preserving, and curing techniques that rely heavily on salt or are solely concerned with salt. A broccoli soup recipe teaches the art of salting gradually whilst cooking. The authors suggest beginning with no salt and call for its gradual addition accompanied by careful tasting along the way. The soup …