The Souvenir Was Salt, and It Must Not Be Cooked

Coarse salt is a difficult thing to bring home as a souvenir, because the person you hand it to will think about pasta water.

In his second year of primary school, a boy from Puglia went on a class trip to the saltworks at Margherita di Savoia. There the sea is let into flat pans and left until the water goes and the salt stays, heaped into white hills you can see from the road. There were flamingos standing in the shallow pans. At the end, each child was given a packet of coarse salt to take home.

Years later, at middle school, he wrote about his primary years for the school’s blog, and the saltworks came first, ahead of every other trip. He still, he said, had a handful of that salt.

A handful. Years later. In a kitchen, where salt goes to die.

I have to explain why this impresses me so deeply. In my house, a souvenir has the life expectancy of a mayfly. The eldest brought home a stick of rock from Brighton that my husband ate during a film. The middle one brought back a bag of special Belgian sugar from a class trip to a sugar refinery in Tienen, and I put it in a cake before anybody had told me it was special. She has mentioned this at every birthday since, including mine.

The youngest returned from a school visit to a Brussels chocolate museum with three chocolates in a little bag. They lasted the length of the tram.

So a boy who could keep a packet of plain coarse salt in a family kitchen, through years of family cooking, away from every pan, has achieved something I cannot. Every evening someone in that house reached for salt. Every evening the souvenir was not it.

The flamingos, I note, get one line from him. He was right about that too. A flamingo is interesting for about four minutes. A mountain of salt is interesting all day.

I have now made a rule. Anything a child brings home from a school trip goes on a high shelf above the fridge, labelled with name and date, until the child says it may be eaten, cooked or thrown away.

It has been working for a month. The shelf holds a pebble, a pine cone and an envelope marked SALT – DO NOT TOUCH, which the youngest got from me, out of the kitchen cupboard, and which I am apparently no longer allowed to use.