On a breezy day in October 2019, fresh off my morning 7-11 egg-salad sandwich and cold can of Boss coffee, I navigated my way through the crowds at the Azabu-Juban stop on the Tokyo Metro. I walked a couple of blocks through bustling sidewalks, and arrived at Ma-Suya, a culinary store stocked to the brim with just one item—salt.
The walls of Ma-Suya were packed with salt, over 300 kinds, sourced from every possible place and for every imaginable use. Among these, a range of scented bath salts, large blocks of pink Himalayan salt for grilling on, salt amulets for protection when hiking, and, of course, salt for cooking: fine Okinawan sea salt known as Yukishio; delicate gray salt from the Noto Peninsula; Amabito no Moshio that was scraped off seaweed; and bowls full of salt compounded with yuzu, cocoa, truffle, matcha, and plum. A soft-serve machine churned out simple, salt-inflected vanilla ice cream, which customers sprinkled with their choice of a dozen other salts, including a punchy wasabi mixture and a tangy citrus salt. It was a salt wonderland.
I came to Ma-Suya not just for its novelty, but because to me, it represented the ultimate souvenir store. Some people collect keychains and shot glasses on travels; my grandmother used to collect souvenir spoons wherever she went; but for me, the thing I always make room for in my bag is far more utilitarian—salt.
My hunt for salt isn’t one that everyone understands, because isn’t all salt just sodium chloride after all? It’s true that unless you go for a flavored or compound salt, the grains that you bring back from Japan are going to taste similar to the ones from the box of Morton’s in your kitchen: salty. So why devote precious luggage space to something you could pick up at the corner store?
The difference comes in salt’s many textures, shapes, and presentations. Something as simple as the size of your salt matters—and the kind of salt that cooks use, no matter where you go, can affect the ultimate flavor of the cuisine, almost as much as local produce and culinary technique. As an avid home cook, I regularly attempt to recreate dishes from the places that I’ve gone to on vacation, and I’ve found that it often comes down to having the right salt.
I started my salt collection on a solo trip to Paris six years ago, trying to find a balm for a rough breakup in the city’s many pastries and perfume shops. I popped into Le Bon Marché and headed straight for its designer purses and jewel-toned silk scarves, only to find they were all vastly out of my price range. I wanted something transformative to bring back, a talisman that I could reach for when I returned to Brooklyn to face all the usual struggles of daily life, to remind myself of the person I was in Paris—unburdened, curious, and open to whatever the future might bring. When I moved on to browsing the gourmet foods section, my eye snagged on a box of Fleur de Sel de Guerande, a hand-harvested sea salt from Brittany. As a souvenir, it was affordable and practical. It was also something I knew I would interact with all the time in my kitchen, and my favorite kind of gift to myself: the most luxurious version of a quotidian object. I bought it and tucked it into my carry-on. When I got home, I found that each time I used the salt, it brought me a little moment of pleasure, a tiny memory of swooping around Paris by myself, feeling a little heartbroken and a little bit more glamorous for it.
So, I began building my own salt library by seeking out an interesting local salt wherever I went. The second time I procured salt, I was visiting family in Ireland and stopped into a little tourist shop that carried giant gray flakes of salt harvested from the Irish Sea. The next one was on a road trip through the American Southwest, where I grabbed some pink salt mined from the Bonneville Salt flats on the Utah-Nevada border. In Zihuatanejo, Mexico, I picked up sal de gusano, a spicy, smokey salt infused with ground-up worm, which I use at home to rim cocktails and sprinkle on fruit. When visiting Lake Garda in Italy earlier this year, I picked up a fine Sicilian sea salt, fantastic for baking with, and later this summer, while traveling outside of Bangkok, I pulled over the car at a roadside stand by the Salt Lake de Maeklong to buy a bag of salt harvested there. Once I let people in on my collection, I started to accumulate salts generously brought over from other people’s travels: kala namak from outside Delhi, Paška sol from Croatia, and crunchy, smoked mineral salt from Iceland. My collection now consists of more than two dozen salts, all with different characteristics and varying uses.
Salt is one of those ingredients that is so ubiquitous that you can easily overlook it, so having at my fingertips so many options is a reminder of just how diverse and interesting even the simplest item can be. It is also that rare ingredient that, when used with a light hand, doesn’t just make a dish taste salty, it makes it taste more like itself. In my more sentimental moments, I’d say that’s exactly what travel does for me, too. Putting myself in a different context, carving out new neural pathways, and inserting myself into unfamiliar situations reminds me of who I am, outside of my everyday chores, my job, and my relationships. Salt isn’t just a fun, inexpensive souvenir, it’s a reminder of why I travel in the first place. Plus, it makes my home cooking taste better—no shot glass or keychain can do that.