It’s not all plain saline

For me, Brittany will always be the place where, aged nine and a half, I had my first taste of foreign food. Just hearing the name conjures up a crowded campsite, queues for the showers, the staccato drone of rain battering canvas and my dad reversing our new Citroen into a bollard at Portsmouth harbour.

But for the French, Brittany is renowned for salt – specifically, for Breton fleur du sel. It is somehow appropriate that a place where authentic local dishes (and pizzas) come with crab and cockles, or lobster and langoustines, should have made its name from the sea.

In Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky explains the appeal of fleur du sel. It is, he says,”handmade and traditional in a world increasingly hungry for a sense of artisans”. Seawater runs through sluices into salt pans the size of football pitches and, under the sun and brackish Atlantic winds, slowly evaporates.

As the brine thickens, the paludier skims the precious white crystals with a reed brush or rake and piles them neatly into man-sized pyramids. This is how it was done in the Middle Ages, and how it is still done.

The brilliant white fleur du sel is used only when the dish deserves the best – to garnish a wild salmon carpaccio or to give rich, buttery Breton biscuits a salty kick. The grey salt that remains in the pans sells at a fraction of the price for home cooking or salting fish and vegetables.

Driving towards Guerande, the medieval capital of this kingdom of salt, the road skirts the Grande-Brière marsh. The terrain is flat to the horizon – only the odd cider stall or passing cow disturbs the emptiness.

Close by lies Quiberon, famous for its oysters, and as the site of French royalism’s last hurrah (predictably, it ended in a bloodbath). Visitors flock to the nearby menhirs of Carnac and the Gulf of Morbihan, which used to have an island for every day of the year until rising seas left just 40.

But all these are newcomers in the revenue-generating stakes. Guerande, which still surveys the chequer-board salt pans from behind solid 15th-century ramparts, has been looking downhill towards Saille and its source of wealth for centuries. From a time well before Saxo, Guerande salt was despatched to the Baltic empires of Sweden and Hansa and the cod fishermen of Newfoundland; to the English court and the cotton farmers of the New World.

Over time, of course, people have found other things to do with nature’s bounty. Dotted up and down the coast today, for example, are thalassotherapy centres, where portly Frenchmen and chain-smoking ladies come to feel the healing power of seawater. At the Hôtel Royal-Thalasso in La Baule, the modern spa is built on the side of a fading Victorian hotel that used to be a tuberculosis hospital.

The algae baths smell like seafood, look like dirty ditchwater and bubble away like geysers. But the seaweed wrap is exactly as it sounds – completely naked, I cooked for 20 minutes in a thermal tortilla, basted in a marine pesto sauce. How medicinal it was, I’m not sure. But it was fun and cheap. And certainly a lot more Breton than coq au vin or Calvados.

First published in the Sunday Telegraph