The salt librarian

Perry Ho, salt librarian and purveyor of cheekily named artisanal salts like Borneo Snow through his line Salt Grammar, available at The Indiana Supply Co. Maybe my family should have forced me to be a lawyer. Then I’d be having high tea over there [at the Raffles Hotel], not here [the dinky café in which we’re sitting]. I did think about a career in banking once. It sounded interesting. It’s the polar opposite of the world I know. Do you know anyone in finance? I applied to be the PA of the director of an investment firm. Well, actually I just picked up the phone and cold-called him. He was the friend of my friend’s dad, a real old-timer, like Old Testament times. Anyway, I think it was just too out there for the gentleman, who was like, "That’s great, why don’t you write in to HR?" I’ve always been writing. I used to write scripts for animated children’s programs, public service announcements, and documentaries on science and nature. And I still do it now and then when the opportunity comes long. I get to meet people and go to places I wouldn’t otherwise go. I’m also the published author of a children’s book [Like Fins for Feet] and a collection of poetry. I love stories. That’s one of the things that attracted me to salt. The salts I sell are artisanal, heirloom salts. They each have their own story, from the environment they are made in to the history and culture of the people who make them. This whole project is a love letter to my mom. She passed away last year. She was born in Singapore after the Second World War and worked as a secretary her whole life. She was looking ahead to retirement when she started tossing around the idea of opening a mom and pop store, like the kind you see in Singapore’s heartland. She wanted to have something to do to spend her days after she retired. At first, I thought it was a strange idea, but then I thought, you know this does sound fairly interesting. What if we tweak it a little? What if we had a provision shop where everything we had in it had a great story behind it? And her passing was the catalyst for this. I wanted a place full of beautiful things to honor her. I’m carrying on where she left off. I started to think about the how we define value after my mom passed away. My mom liked pretty things but she didn’t consume mindlessly. Like many Chinese women of her generation, she would buy gold jewelry with every month’s salary. She didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it in sophisticated terms—i.e. hedging against the future etc.—but she would tell me that when I started working I should put aside a little money every month to buy something of value. But I only understood what she meant when I went through her jewelry collection after she passed away. There is value in things that have a history. My mom’s jewelry collection was full of pieces that she had collected over forty years. The pieces were real heirlooms, very unique, very Chinese, many of which were passed down from her mother.

And this is also the value in the salts I sell. There is one salt that a tribe from Borneo has been making for ages. They live by the coastal areas and extract their salt from the roots of a certain mangrove tree through a really unique process. Then there’s this other salt from a village in Bali that has been making salt the same way for at least two hundred years.But with industrialization and modernization, all these old ways of salt-making are being destroyed. Many have already disappeared. The reasons have to do with economics and politics. Governments try to control the salt trade because salt is such a necessity. It’s only now that there’s an awareness of what is being lost. Those salt farmers who stuck it out through the lean years, they lived on the margins. But they are slowly coming back--if they were lucky enough to record the old ways. A lot of knowledge has been lost.You’d be surprised to know where your table salt comes from. Modern table salt, which costs about fifty cents for five hundred grams, is a process and product of big industry. Large corporations harvest salt in great quantities for a variety of purposes. Salt is used in de-icing roads, in making glass, textiles, pharmaceuticals etc. The salt that makes it to your table is a by-product of these industries. What they do to make it safe for consumption is to refine it and then bleach it.I don’t want to sound pretentious by talking about terroir, but there’s a noticeable taste difference in salts from different places. My Borneo Snow salt is just lovely. When I bring it to professional chefs, they fall in love with it. Basically what I sell is the total opposite of industrialized table salt.I’m looking for a Singaporean salt. There has to be a community that harvested salt here before Raffles came and it became a trading hub, since salt consumption is a necessity in hot climates. The conditions here also seem like they would be perfect for salt harvesting. I’ve been talking to a historian and he says there’s no evidence for something like that. But if you're reading this and know anything, get in touch!