Fleur de sel
Fleur de sel has been collected since ancient times (it was mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his book Natural History), and was traditionally used as a purgative and salve.
[7] Sea salt has been gathered around the world for millennia, but over the last thousand years, fleur de sel was harvested only in France.
As the market for specialty salts has grown, companies have begun to harvest fleur de sel for export wherever the geographic and meteorological conditions are favorable.
[18] Flor de sal is harvested in Portugal, mostly in the Aveiro District[19] and in the Algarve,[20][21] but also in the salt marshes of Castro Marim,[22] at the mouth of the Guadiana River that forms the border to Spain.
For centuries flor de sal was scraped away and either discarded or given to workers, as its presence disturbed the evaporation that was creating the sea salt underneath.
[23] The process of harvesting flor de sal for sale was reintroduced in 1997 by Necton, with a grant to develop ways to capitalize Portugal's natural resources.
Saltworks have operated on La Palma and Lanzarote for centuries,[32] but the flor de sal that resulted was kept for the use of the workers until 2007, when the salt gained gourmet status.
The culinary rediscovery of fleur de sel and other gourmet salts has saved small scale artisanal saltworks in the Canaries, which were in rapid decline.
[36] Mexico has produced both sea salt and flor de sal since Aztec times from the Lagoon of Cuyutlán on the Pacific Coast.
[37] Flor de sal is also harvested along the beaches of Celestun in Yucatan, Mexico, where Mayans cultivated salt 1,500 years ago for its distribution throughout Mesoamerican trade routes extending to Guatemala, Central America and the Caribbean.
[38] Brazil started producing flor de sal in 2008 in the traditional salt-producing area of Macau, in the state of Rio Grande do Norte.
[40] Because it is harvested naturally from the sea and is usually not refined, fleur de sel has more mineral complexity than common table salt.
