I enjoy reading the excellent food pages in The Westmorland Gazette and would like the opportunity to highlight an important 'key' of great cooking and spanking good health, is the essential ingredient of 'sea salt'.

This is not the same as 'refined salt', sold in our shops as 'table salt'.

Sea salt has roughly 87 essential minerals and we need these minerals to help maintain good health. When salt is absent in the body, it struggles to maintain the essential electrolyte solutions, with often disastrous health consequences.

The very best sea salt is pink 'Himalayan Rock Crystal Salt', which is the salt I have for the table and less expensive sea salt is in my cupboard for cooking.

It is interesting to consider that the word 'salt' is derived from 'sal'. Consider the importance of these words: Salary - connected to Roman times when an ounce of salt was worth an ounce of gold and Romans were paid in salt; salve - a healing balm; saliva - salty secretion which helps alkalise the foods we eat and protect our teeth.

More gems of information, are that apparently there used to be a Morecambe Bay salt industry and at the Westmorland County Show last summer, I was impressed to see a large block of pink sea salt on display at the front of a trade stand and it was a farm animal 'salt lick!'

There is plenty of information on the internet about the importance of good quality sea salt in our diets and two excellent books to purchase are: Water and Salt - the Healing Power of Nature by Dr Hendel and Peter Ferreira and 'Salt Your Way to Health' by Dr Brownstein.

Penny Pullen

Grange-over-Sands