bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), p. 40
we had a “diplomatic incident”. Now he has a cup of kosher salt at the ready beside the sink to avoid future tragedy.
Admittedly, I’ve become a bit of a salt collector. In addition to grocery store varieties, I’ve been adding to a small collection as I discovered pink Himalayan salt at Farm Boy and reddish Alae’a salt in Hawaii, which is used to prepare the famous Kalua pork at luaus. The red colour comes from the high iron content in the soil; Hawaiian warriors used to drink the soil, mixed with water, before going into battle believing it gave them strength. Hawaii also produces green and black salts (that’s for my next trip.) l’m also working on a bag of the big daddy of all fancy salts: Fleur de Sel de Guérande, made only in Brittany, France and only when the tide and winds are right. Oh yes. Fancy pants salt. Not to mention the solid rock of blue Persian salt my significant other brought back for me from Pakistan.
What makes certain salts special and others not so much? At its core, all edible salt is simple sodium chloride. Two things can make it “different”: the shape and the extra minerals. Flakes of salt have a larger surface, making them taste saltier on your tongue, while minerals can affect both the colour and flavour.
Salt is the ultimate undepletable resource, as the ocean will always have more to give. Speaking of resources, the word “salary” comes from the Latin word salarium, which referred to the money given to Roman soldiers to buy salt. Hopefully they were each given a fair shake.
Lisa Bitto has been a political stream Foreign Service Officer for nearly nine years, and an avid baker, cook and food geek since her mother first refused to bake her cookies and she took matters into her own hands. She usually chooses her vacation destinations based on the food.
Way back in the 1970s the Department’s Ottawa duty officer normally stayed at home and fielded calls forwarded by the Commissionaires at Fort Pearson. It was my great pleasure to have been volunteered as duty officer for the August bank holiday long weekend in about 1977.
My trials began Saturday morning when I received a call from a junior officer at the Hungarian Embassy. He explained that he had issued visas for travel to Hungary to an academic and a Member of Parliament during the week and had sent their passports out by courier on Friday. However, he had just received a call from the academic (who was to attend a conference starting in Budapest on Monday morning) to say that he had received by mistake the Member of Parliament’s passport and visa. Obviously, my new Hungarian friend explained, his secretary had put the wrong passports in the wrong envelopes. He needed to get the academic’s passport back from the Member of Parliament’s box in the parliamentary mailroom.
As we External types always try to be helpful, I undertook to call security in the Centre Block and see what could be done. I received a frosty response from a security guard, who had apparently been harassed by the pest from Budapest. He explained to me that there was nothing he could do as the person who had the key to the mailroom had gone to her cottage for the long weekend, and had no telephone there.
I called the Hungarian Embassy and explained that nothing could be done until Tuesday morning. He wouldn’t take no for the answer though, and called me back several times during the day. On the last call, he suggested that he and I could go to parliament and “enter the male room by use of force” to retrieve the passport! Somewhat stunned by the proposal, I let the conversation lapse for a moment — which he may have taken for weakness or a softening in my position, because he hastened to add that if the roles were reversed, he would do this for me in Budapest.
For a moment, I wondered what the Ottawa Citizen would make out of report that a diplomat from a Communist state and an officer of the Department of External Affairs were caught breaking down the door of the parliamentary mailroom with a crowbar. With this in mind, I reiterated that he would have to wait until Tuesday, when he could speak to the Member of Parliament’s office. I heard no more from him and often wondered if he had been sent to a Hungarian equivalent of the gulag for his transgression.
David Bickford is a retired Foreign Service Officer with a wry sense of humour nurtured through long experience in Latin America and with the International Assessment Staff at PCO.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), p. 40. Read the rest of this issue →
