why do we (expect to) shake salt?

July 21, 2019 4:55 PM

I switched to a chunky (and damp) sea salt a few years ago. After messing with grinders and then moving house and having to make do without the grinder and achieving a pathetic epiphany while taking a pinch of salt, it became apparent to me that expecting salt to pour or shake is stupid. When and/or why did we start expecting that form and behaviour from salt?

Making it tiny cubic granules that pour freely requires all sorts of effort and anti-caking agents, etc. - but it works perfectly well as long as we don’t expect it to behave in an unnatural way.

I did try googling it and I’m usually decent at this sort of thing but maybe I am getting not-good at it so thank you for your patience and expertise.

posted by you must supply a verb to Food & Drink (21 answers total)

Morton Salt, "When it rains, it pours". Big advertising campaign in the early 1910's about this always freely pours salt. It's pretty famous.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:10 PM on July 21, 2019 [20 favorites]

I don't know when it started, but if you want to season food at the table rather than at the stove it is convenient to have salt that in small, regular granules and that doesn't clump. It's a modern convenience, like ice cubes in summer: unnatural but nice to have.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:41 PM on July 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

Size wise is probably a side effect of industrial scale processing and automation. Crush big chuncks, pass through screen, recycle bits that are too big. Screen resulting bits and recycle the too small back to the evaporation pools. Package the just the right size bits. Build a machine that does tons and tons of salt per day and puts the just right bits into bags or cans with labels and send them to stores. Once you set it up it churns out a decent product cheaply.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:01 PM on July 21, 2019

I have a cookbook called The Cookin’ Woman, first published in 1949, by Florence Irwin, the “first domestic science instructor” in Ireland, who traveled the country teaching cooking and also collecting old recipes, published in this book. Looking through the recipes, I see one recipe for salted beans calling for “well dried salt” and a recipe for pickles that begins “dry the salt before weighing.” Presumably, if you have to dry your salt, you’re not just pouring it. No dates suggesting how old these recipes are though.
posted by FencingGal at 6:37 PM on July 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

Some quick googling on the history of salt shakers indicates zengargoyle is right; Morton invented a way to keep salt from caking and that was when people started to expect that behavior. See this page on the history of the salt shaker, for instance.
posted by Redstart at 6:44 PM on July 21, 2019 [3 favorites]

This brief history of salt shakers says they were first invented in 1858 and that in 1871, a shaker was invented with an agitator that broke up the clumps. Before this, there were salt grinders like pepper grinders.
posted by FencingGal at 6:47 PM on July 21, 2019 [4 favorites]

Cargill Salt Group’s Salt Manufacturing Processes | Cargill has pretty infographics of a few varieties of salt production. Most likely the little cubes of common table salt are precipitated out of a saturated brine solution, dredged, centrifuged, dried, screened, and packaged.

Morton has a page as well: Salt Production and Processing - Morton Salt.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:55 PM on July 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

Several observations:

1) I have sneered at salt grinders. It seemed like a silly thing when salt can just be shaken and, come on, it's not like there's fresh salt like there's fresh pepper.

2) I have a friend who always shakes salt into his hand before putting it on his food (either from his hand or from the shaker) to know how much salt to use

3) I had the misfortune the other day to use a salt that was too finely ground and which poured (well, shook) far too fast.

So... maybe I have to give this salt grinder thing another chance. I could get different grain sizes and easily (if approximately) control the quantity. It's totally worth rethinking.
posted by sjswitzer at 11:43 PM on July 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is interesting, from the history of salt shakers link:
The salt cellar, also called the open salt, was a special dish that held salt. These were bowl-shaped dishes without lids. As early as the middle ages in well-to-do households, the head of the house was given a salt bowl called a master salt with a tiny silver spoon. He would pass it around the table to his guests, and each would help themselves. This custom continued until WW II in some households, but has since passed by the wayside.
When I was a child, we had a lot of little salt cellars on the table, with the little spoons in them. I was told that it is bad form to use a shaker, for reasons that were never revealed, but it could be that you have better control over the amount you are using. So I still use salt cellars, though only with the little spoons when we have guests. Some things you just continue doing without thinking about why.
I have some friends who find the chunky salt really irritating, and for them I provide a salt mill.
posted by mumimor at 12:00 AM on July 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've had a few pairs of salt and pepper grinders. The salt grinders last for about ten years before they oxidise(?) and gum up beyond repair. The pepper grinders last forever.
posted by einekleine at 12:58 AM on July 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

Salt shakers were only introduced when "free-flowing" salt was invented by Morton 100 years ago -- it has magnesium added as an anti-caking agent (though one could wish for a more effective result!) as well as iodine.

Plenty of people still use salt cellars. I have never owned a salt shaker in my life. While 100 years ago a salt cellar would only have had rock or flake salt, people put standard table salt in them as well now.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:48 AM on July 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for the helpful responses, everyone. I am indeed familiar with the famous Morton salt tagline. My question comes from having suddenly realised that I had been viewing salt through a presentist lens, and my definition and expectation of "salt" were not universal across time and space. At some point in history, saying "when it rains, it pours" about salt would have been like Volvo saying "our cars get your dishes cleanest, fastest!" It was not expected that salt would have the physical properties of sand. From the helpful links above, it looks like some people had attempted to use shakers to distribute salt at various points over at least the preceeding 50 and possibly several hundred years, but the material wasn't cooperative until Morton did the magnesium carbonate thing in 1911.

I guess it's similar to the shift from sugar in loaves to granulated sugar that we could pour. Many technology shifts aren't from something less-good to an improved technology (e.g. stone to bronze, bronze to iron) - initially the new technology is often inferior to the previous until we get the hang of it, so what drives the shift? Salt worked fine as it was (pinch, spoon, weigh), sugar worked fine as it was (it could be weighed instead of measured volumetrically when precsision was needed). I'd love to find historical references to people talking about the change in the technology. I'm guessing it was technology-driven ("We can do this now!" or even "This is a cheaper way to produce/ship this!") or fashion (like the new-fangled fork) rather than people saying "there's got to be a better way" - but possibly there was a specific application that needed sugar or salt to be free-running, which drove the technology shift and everyone else got dragged along. Industrial-scale canned food and/or other industrial-scale food production? I have a vague notion that WWI was about the time Things In Tins started... Since these things happened within the past few hundred years, there's probably a fair amount of interesting documentary evidence about the shift (like FencingGal's cookbook). Or maybe I need to go re-watch everything James Burke ever did, because he probably covered this and I've forgotten.
posted by you must supply a verb at 5:38 AM on July 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

I have been to formal dinners within the past decade that used salt cellars. That isn't dead.

Presumably, if you have to dry your salt, you’re not just pouring it.

That instruction doesn't have to do with the size of the granules (Morton's fine grain pouring salt was available long before that). It's from before salt typically had anti-caking additives in it, which often work by absorbing or repelling moisture from marrying with the salt molecules. Even my own organic sea salt (no additives) clumps up in the summer, and that's what happened before additives were common and effective. I don't know what to say about the bean recipe without seeing it, but for the pickle brine, it'd be really important to dry the salt before weighing because moisture is heavy and if you think you have an ounce of salt that turns out to really be 3/4 ounces of salt and 1/4 ounce of water, you won't have an effective pickle bring at the end.
posted by Miko at 5:40 AM on July 22, 2019 [5 favorites]

We haven't used Mortons for years and years. The flavor of less-processed salts is so much better. For a long time we used kosher salt, but in the last couple years we've been using Maldon's.

If you bake with it you need to grind it a little, but that's no big deal.
posted by uberchet at 6:53 AM on July 22, 2019

Dry salt is a lot easier to sprinkle evenly on food. No clumps of too much on one bite, not enough on the rest. Rice grains in the salt shaker will absorb excess moisture, but not advisable in a grinder!
posted by Enid Lareg at 7:18 AM on July 22, 2019

When you pinch salt, your hands are getting the rest of the salt dirty. It may be fine when you are at home, but I don't want to get my restaurant salt from a bowl where others have put their dirty fingers.
posted by soelo at 10:01 AM on July 22, 2019

Is this helpful?

Seems like mainly a product of pre-industrialization and needing to get large-scale shipping, but I mainly skimmed it.

We put salt in little metal pinch bowls. I like fine grained salt for popcorn and Mr. Llama likes it on rice, but for everything else we use kosher salt and it doesn't work in our salt shakers so we gave up on shakers mostly years ago. I have come to really like the tactile feel and certain knowledge of how much I'm using, as opposed to sometimes with salt shakers they dump a ton and sometimes they sprinkle eight grains and call it a day. Also, you can sprinkle from well above and get good coverage with a smaller amount, if that's a thing you want to do (like I sprinkle on warm butterscotch cookies sometimes...)
posted by A Terrible Llama at 1:55 PM on July 22, 2019 [3 favorites]

...for home entertaining incidentally we put both bowls of salt and shakers on the table. People can do as they please. We use our plague-infested fingers but don't force it on others.

The bowls are quite small -- it's not like a sugar bowl out for days, except for the one I keep for cooking which is just a big mason jar thing with a rubber seal.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 1:57 PM on July 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

Yes, the bowls are tiny, and so are the little spoons. You don't want the same salt cellar being used for days or weeks. In my kitchen I have a little wooden shovel in the salt cellar full of sea salt.
In restaurants, I very rarely use the salt and pepper or any of the condiments after a harrowing experience once. I won't spoil your day with details.
posted by mumimor at 6:17 AM on July 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

The little bowls of salt for pinching are still a common thing in Eastern Europe and Russia. Just a point of comparison, I guess tradition won out on the modern world there, at least in some contexts.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:25 AM on July 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Twenty comments in and no one has brought up THE Salt book yet? I'm a little surprised, searching for 'shaker' actually only turned up one mention. However, while trying all sorts of variations and synonyms for 'sprinkle', I was reminded that even the crudest earliest applications of salt pretty much all require it to be crushed up and evenly distributed. You can't preserve a side of meat with a salt block.

I think smallish grains have always been the end goal and larger forms were the economic concession to making production and shipping easier. In other words, technological innovation in free-flowing salt were the result of this expectation, not the cause.

BTW the intro of the book has a quick mention of various beliefs about handling salt: "Medieval European etiquette paid a great deal of attention to how salt was touched at the table - with the tip of a knife and never by hand."
posted by yeahlikethat at 9:18 AM on July 24, 2019 [3 favorites]