Monthly Archives: May 2012

how to make salt

Posted on by

0

HOW TO MANUFACTURE SALT FOR HOME USE

Take a towel, or any piece of cloth—say, two yards long—sew the two ends together, hang it on a roller, and let one end revolve in a tub or basin of salt water; the sun and air will act the on cloth, and evaporate the water rapidly. It must be revolved several times throughout the day, so that the cloth is well saturated. When the solution is evaporated to near the bottom, dip from the concentrated brine and pour it in a large flat dish or plate; let it remain in the sun until the salt is formed; taking it in every night, and placing a cover on it. Each gallon of salt water will produce two and a half ounces of salt when evaporated.

p.s. To make salt requires a little patience, as it is of slow formation.

–John Commins, Charleston tannery, Charleston Mercury, June 11, 1862

.

HOW TO MAKE SALT

Read Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History. (Or don’t, it’s long.)

Visit your family in California. Google “Los Angeles ocean water quality.” Read about a wonderful nonprofit that is trying to clean up LA’s beaches, but learn nothing useful in terms of cleanliness for salt making. Decide Malibu will offer the cleanest water, for no reason except that it seems like the cleanest water.

Borrow your mother’s car and, while you’re at it, four expired one-gallon water jugs from the garage’s earthquake supply kit. (Wonder what would happen if one drank water a decade after which it expires, and how it is, precisely, that water expires.)

Drive to Malibu. Park. Unload large backpack loaded with large, plastic jugs. Undress, have a swim, remembering how bloody freezing the Pacific water is, and then return to the ocean carrying two of the empty gallon jugs. Swim past the waves and push them under the water while you try to stay afloat and also try to avoid early breakers because waves carry dirt and you don’t want dirt in your salt water which will soon become salt. Slosh out of the water back to your towel, spilling heavy water as you traipse, bowlegged, over the hot sand. Screw on bottle caps. Repeat with jugs #3 and 4.

Lie on your towel to dry. Tan?

Laugh when, after a surfer struts by and eyeballs your setup, he calls, “Don’t get dehydrated today!”

Open large backpack and load four gallons of water into the backpack. Try again with three when you learn you cannot carry four gallons of water on your back and still walk straight up a very unstable rock jetty.

Drive home. (Preferably during rush hour.) Rinse the dust out of your grandmother’s 10-pound steel kettle. Filter water through pillow case. (First, ask: “Mom, do we have any cheesecloth? I’m supposed to filter the water through cheesecloth.” Mom: “Nope.” Me: “Do you think a pillowcase will work instead?” Mom: “Sure.” Me: “Wait! Will a pillowcase filter out the salt?” Mom: “Hmmm. I don’t know.” Stare at each other. Think this through for ten or twelve seconds. Realize, with some chagrin, that if de-salinating water were this easy, LA wouldn’t have to steal water from Colorado.)

Boil salt water.

Turn heat down. Simmer salt water.

Open windows when kitchen steams up.

Simmer, simmer, water. Billow, billow, steam.

Watch, in the evening, and then the next morning, and again the next evening, how the water level sinks, line by crusty line. Watch the water become milkier, white, crystallize.

Wait. Simmer.

Salt. Slushy salt crystals, a salt-sludge.

Remove salt sludge, spread in pan. Dry. Wait. Dry. Taste. Salt. It is SALT! (Dad: “Well, what did you think would happen?”)

Stash bag of white crystals in bottom of carry on for flight from LAX to TUS. Slide through security undetected.

a prickly book review

Posted on by

0

Well now, speaking of cactus here’s a review I wrote of Scott Calhoun’s bloomin’ new book, The Gardener’s Guide to Cactus, over on the Terrain.org blog.

I moved to the desert and I bought a cactus. Four of them, actually: a squat golden barrel cactus for the front porch and three dainty pincushions for the kitchen window ledge. I remember standing over a sea of potted succulents at my local, I am embarrassed to say, Home Depot, wondering what kind of cactus would best adorn my adobe apartment. The one with a halo of faint fuzzy spines? The one with wavering purple pads waving hello from the safety of its plastic container?
If only I’d had Scott Calhoun’s The Gardener’s Guide to Cactus: The 100 Best Paddles, Barrels, Columns, and Globes. Calhoun, a garden designer based in Tucson, Arizona, knows his cactus. (And, yes, Calhoun informs us, “cactus” is an acceptable way to refer to a cactus in the plural. Both “cacti” and “cactuses” are also grammatically correct.)

[continue reading]

bloomin’

Posted on by

0

The saguaros are blooming!

Image

They bloomed all at once, their tight flower buds emerging like a breakout on the forehead of a pubescent teenager. Indeed, they are a pimply sort of flower, taut green knobs that explode in a flare of white petals. Accustomed to the smooth crest of the easily-sketched saguaro shape, these protrusions are arresting, comical—and they are everywhere, crowning the tops every parking-lot saguaro, roadside stand, or, in my case, sentinel of a landscaped courtyard.

Actually, now that I begin to look, I see that all the cacti are blooming. My delight in the blooming cacti is an embarrassing yet unavoidable consequence of my delight in all things southwestern, from the kitschy to the cliché. Succulents bloom—the ocotillo in quiet red flares, the prickly pear in waxy yellow fists—and spring folds into summer, into the wavering heat of morning that lingers until the end of dusk. A second semester rolls to a close and suddenly it is summer in another sense. The academic term ends, I am released to write on my own time—time which has become something much more lolling. Meandering among bike rides, blooms, and quiet mornings.