Before the later salty tale

Sometimes stories have extra dimensions. I recently saw that reality in a story where I hadn’t seen it before—until someone else’s reaction reminded me. That’s a good thing.

Last Sunday I published “A salty story peppered with more”, which was just a simple story about salt and pepper grinders—until I was reminded it wasn’t. My pal Roger Green left a comment on that post:

I had never HEARD of a salt grinder. A pepper grinder I use regularly.

As I said in my reply, “actually, I’d never heard of one until well after I moved to New Zealand.” Naturally, there’s a story there, too.

When I first arrived in New Zealand in 1995, Nigel had the sort of salt container that was common at the time, as well as a supermarket pepper shaker. The photo above shows both, along with a salt pig (stay tuned…). Nigel and I replaced the salt container several times, but what I noticed about it was that there were two settings: Pour a lot, or, maybe, somewhat less: There was no shaker. I found it very difficult to work out how to use the thing (to “sprinkle” salt, I had to make the opening as small as possible). Eventually we switched to salt grinders, something I’ve used ever since.

The pepper shaker is many years old, and I still use it—however, I don’t use it unless I’m mixing a spice blend that requires a certain amount of ground pepper: It’s far easier to use that shaker than to grind pepper and then try to measure it. When it does run out some day, whatever will I do? Probably buy another.

Now, the salt pig: It's a wonderful thing. A salt pig (in New Zealand) is usually an earthenware pot that contains salt. There’s usually a spoon, often wood (as in the photo of mine above), to help dispense the salt. The idea is that salt is always available when cooking, which is useful plenty of times. However, I personally use mine mostly when making pasta (I salt the water once it’s boiling to help keep the pasta from sticking; contrary to popular belief, salting the water before it boils doesn’t make it boil faster—it’s the opposite, actually—but it does, apparently, help prevent the pasta from clumping and sticking together, or, it seems to do so for me).

Nigel wanted a salt pit for a long time, even though they were kind of old fashioned. When we were out and about one day, we saw and bought the one in the photo. I’m pretty sure it was at our last house together (though it could’ve been the house before that), but I have absolutely no memory of where or when we bought it. At the time, it just seemed like a perfectly ordinary thing to do, not worthy of note—so now I have no idea how or when it came into our lives. Even so, I use it all the time.

What this addendum is about, really, is that every story has annexes and anterooms, some of which lead to whatever our current story is. This is one of those times.

When I posted last Sunday, I thought it was a very specific story about very specific things. Roger reminded me that it was actually bigger than that, and, in fact, there was an origin story behind it. I think it’s good to think more broadly about our own stories, even the salty ones. This has been one of those times.