When did we all become salt snobs? In May, a lavish cookbook called Sea Salt will arrive, a celebration of what is, after all, a simple chemical compound, NaCl, with a sodium atom for each one of chlorine. Superficially, there’s no room for variation. When I was growing up, salt was salt, a commodity that came in a plastic bag from the supermarket or (in my smarter friends’ houses) in a yellow and red Saxa tub.  

Then, in the 1990s, it all changed. Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, in the tome that epitomised ’90s cool, The River Cafe Cookbook, declared, ‘You must use Maldon salt.’ The flaky crystals, made by a family company in Essex, became the ultimate culinary accessory, found sparkling atop Nigel Slater’s hummus and nestled in Nigella’s handbag.

Other salts found fame in the wake of Maldon. Our own Mark Hix favours Cornish sea salt. Northern Ireland-based butcher Peter Hannan made Himalayan salt the sine qua non of aged steak. Welsh company Halen Môn gained the only British ‘Protected Designation of Origin’ status for salt, guaranteeing that the sole ingredient is Anglesey seawater, with no additional brines from other waters. The family behind it, the Lea-Wilsons, are the ones who have written the cookbook, telling the story of their prized product and how to use it. Rarer still, new kid on the block Sark sea salt is made purely by solar evaporation in the Channel Islands.