How I came to love salt on my fruit

By Monique Ceccato 

It’s been 14 years since I last saw my grandad Sydney, but the memory of him sitting proudly at the head of the kitchen table, glass of Scotch whisky in hand and whistling along to the Three Tenors, is as clear as ever. Generally, that’s where we’d find him when we called around; there or in the kitchen, chopping up chokos he’d plucked from the vine or peeling carrots to add to his next batch of achard (vegetable pickle). 

Raised on the east African island of Mauritius – a nation renowned for its blended African, Indian, Sri Lankan, Chinese and French culture – cooking was something grandad was inherently good at. I’ll be honest, his attempts at pasta left a lot to be desired, but when it came to laying a dinner table with Mauritian Creole dishes, he always knocked it out of the park. 

Of all the wild and wonderful things grandad whipped up for us – pungent rougailles poisson salé (salted fish in a tomato sauce) and obnoxiously spicy cari ourite (octopus curry) – it was the humble plate of sliced fruit that required a warning. While my friends got freshly baked cake or peanut-butter toast as an afternoon snack from their grandparents, I got served garden-fresh guava topped with a heavy hand of salt. And it wasn’t just guava. If there were apples or pineapple around, they got the royal salt treatment too. 

Unless I’d picked it from the tree myself, I always approached the fruit at grandad’s place with caution, giving it a quick sniff and a tentative lick to check if it was safe to eat. Ten times out of 10, it wasn’t. 

“While all my friends got freshly baked cake or peanut-butter toast as an afternoon snack from their grandparents, I got served garden-fresh guava topped with a heavy hand of salt.”

It was beyond my young mind as to why on earth you’d want to ruin a perfectly sweet and fragrant piece of fruit by covering it in something I associated only with savoury. To me, it was as big of a sin as adding coconut cream to a curry – something Mauritians never do. 

Until I visited the island as an adult a few years ago, my mind remained unchanged; salt had no place as a fruit topping. But one encounter with a marchand confits at the Quatre Bornes markets, and I did a complete 180. 

My brother and I were intrigued by the pickle seller at the entrance. His stall was lined with an assortment of jars, some full of green mango in pickling brine, others pineapple, cucumber or June plums. A customer had just purchased a bag of freshly cut pineapple from the pickle seller, and, before handing it over, he dumped spoonful after spoonful of what appeared to be a salt-and-chilli mix on top. 

Though my brother and I were both scarred from the great ‘salted fruit saga’ of our childhoods, there wasn’t a doubt in our minds that we had to follow suit. We had to get a bag. We had to do it for grandad. 

A few Mauritian rupees later, we were each a bag of pineapple, chilli and salt richer. One bite and the memories of grandad came flooding back; the memories of his faded blue t-shirts, of completing crosswords with him at the kitchen table and, of course, all those times his choice of fruit seasoning had repulsed us. The pineapple was sweet but salty. Juicy and fresh, yet comfortingly warm. It tasted exactly like childhood. 

In just that moment, what I thought was just one of my grandad’s great quirks, made so much more sense. Something as trivial as a sprinkle of salt on fresh fruit hadn’t just reconnected me with my departed grandad, but it also opened my eyes to the parts of my culture I was too young to see and appreciate. 

These days, salted fruit isn’t a constant in my diet. That’s not to say that I’ve reverted to my childhood salt-hating ways; it’s quite to the contrary. I love a well-balanced sweet-salty moment, especially when fruit – heck, even chilli – is involved. There’s something so comforting in doing things the way grandad did them and allowing his memory to live on, one salted apple snack at a time.

Original article at SBS.COM.AU