From the clifftop at Porthkerris on the Lizard peninsula in Corn-wall, apart
from the bank of bluebells and the whitewashed houses of the fishing village
of Porthallow further up the coast, there is nothing but the Atlantic ocean
as far as the eye can see. Next stop, America, as they say around here.
Three years ago Tony Fraser sat on this clifftop, and made a decision that
would change his life. With an MSc in forestry, he had spent 16 years
working for the British government planting trees in Africa and the Pacific,
until he and his Swiss wife, Nicole, returned home to bring up their two
children. “We chose Cornwall because we loved the idea of being right on the
edge of the ocean, but there weren’t many jobs for tropical foresters,” he
jokes. “So, like many people, I found myself looking for the Big Idea – that
special business that would allow us to live and work in this beautiful
area.”
Cheese-making, bespoke garden tours… a host of ideas jigged in and out of his
imagination. Then someone mentioned that there had once been an Iron Age
salt works near Porthkerris. “On the edge of the cliff I found this piece
from one of the pots that would have been used to boil up the seawater to
make salt. I thought, ‘Why not make salt here again?’ There is a huge
interest in local British produce, especially Cornish food, and in people’s
minds there is a strong link between Cornwall and the sea. You think of
lighthouses, shipwrecks, smugglers. So harvesting sea salt made perfect
sense.”
To produce sea salt you need to evaporate clean sea water, and this wild
coastline boasts some of the most pristine waters in Britain. “Sea water is
graded in relation to harvesting shellfish,” says Fraser. “Shellfish from
A-grade waters can be eaten straight away, without going through purification
tanks or heat treatment, and here we have the only A-grade water in Cornwall
other than around the Isles of Scilly.”
This February, the idea came to fruition when the Cornish Sea Salt Company
became only the second British producer to start making sea salt on our
shores in 125 years. While Maldon salt is made from sea water drawn from the
River Blackwater in Essex and the Welsh Halen Mon, launched in 1996, is made
from water drawn from the Menai Straits, Cornish Sea Salt is harvested from
water drawn straight out of the ocean. “If I were a long jumper, I could
leap from the processing plant straight into the sea,” says Fraser.
His thirst for history yielded up a rich tradition of salt-making in this
country, which had dwindled almost to the point of extinction. “In the
Domesday Book in 1086, salt-making was recorded as a major industry with
more than 1,000 operations around the coast. Then, when underground salt
deposits dating back 220 million years were found in Cheshire in the 17th
century, and rock salt began to be mined, there was apparently a lot of
political leverage from that area to convince the government to be harsh
when taxing the sea salt producers. So those businesses progressively closed
down.”
Those were the days when salt was still prized as a necessity, without which
we couldn’t preserve summer foods to last the winter months. From time
immemorial fortunes have been made from salt; wars were fought over it. Our
language reflects its importance – the word salary, for example, from the
Latin “sal”, comes from the tradition of paying the soldiers who guarded the
salt roads in salt. These days, however, we have a more confused
relationship with salt. On the one hand there is the romance of the perfect
crystal, harvested from sea water or mined from seams. On the other, we are
faced with dire warnings about the dangers of high levels of salt in our
diet.
However, there is a world of difference between unrefined sea salt, which is
rich with some 60 natural minerals and requires only a pinch to give pure
salt flavour to food, and industrially produced table salt, which is
stripped of its natural magnesium, calcium and potassium, leaving almost
pure, bitter-tasting sodium chloride. It isn’t a smattering of sea or rock
salt we should be worrying about, but the hidden salt within processed
foods. “The message is clear: it is essential for our bodies to have some
pure, natural salt, but not too much,” says Fraser. “The good news is that
this seems to be getting across, as sales of table salt and cooking salt are
down by about eight per cent and those of sea salt, rock salt and low-sodium
salt are up by about the same amount.”
In taste tests, Cornish Sea Salt has been described as slightly saltier than
Maldon and less strong than Halen Mon. Chefs such as Rick Stein and Mark Hix
have supported the new arrival. At the Cove Bar and Restaurant at Maenporth
Beach, near Falmouth, chef proprietor Arty Williams celebrates all things
Cornish, so he is excited to work with a local salt. “It has a real
freshness and a lovely, bright, clean, natural flavour of the sea which is
fantastic over fish or meat,” says Williams. The Cove’s pastry chef, Janine
Cremore, has even been experimenting with the salt in desserts. Her
chocolate mousse spiked with crunchy shards of nougat made with Cornish Sea
Salt and local clotted cream has become a fixture on the menu.
For Fraser, such accolades are music to the ears after the three years of hard
work it took before his salt could go into production. “I had no idea how
many hoops we would have to jump through to set up,” he says. “So much of
this coastline is protected as a special conservation area – and rightly so
– but that meant we had to demonstrate to organisations from the
Environment Agency to the National Trust and Natural England that we could
build a small processing plant that would be environmentally benign.
“We’ve taken an age-old process, but with the help of technology that hasn’t
been used in Europe previously we’ve developed an energy-efficient system,
which also allows us to take sea water in at its universal salt level of 3.5
per cent, take out only 0.5 per cent of that salt per litre through heating,
and send the water back, cooled, into the ocean at 3 per cent. With the
natural dispersal of salt levels there is very little impact on marine life.”
While some French sea salts such as Sel Gris take on a grey or pink tinge from
the clay pans in which they crystallise, the Cornish salt is crystallised in
stainless-steel tanks, and as a result it is a pristine snow white, with a
consistency that crushes easily between the fingers. “The crystals are
smaller than Maldon’s classic pyramid shapes or Halen Mon’s larger flakes,”
says Fraser. “Crystallisation is simply a recipe of time, heat and motion.
Alter any one of those factors and you create crystals of a different size,
shape and texture.”
But comparisons and competition are not what Cornish Sea Salt is about. “I
think that in the future we may see more salt being produced around the
coast,” says Fraser. “We should all be happy to work together to sing out
the praises of British sea salt.”
For stockists, go to www.cornishseasalt.co.uk
