A rough wooden table by a gray Breton sea with a slab of salted butter on a stone, a jar of salted caramel, an open tin of sardines, a stack of buckwheat crêpes, a bowl of cider and a mound of gray sea salt

Brittany Food Guide: Why the Butter Is Salted

Published 9 Sep 20266 min read

For centuries, salt in most of France carried a heavy and profoundly unequal royal tax called the gabelle. Brittany, which kept its own privileges when it was joined to France in 1532, was exempt. Salt there was cheap: untaxed, and made on the coast in the marshes around Guérande by evaporating seawater in clay pans. Bretons salted their butter with it. Where salt was taxed, butter was usually unsalted; in Brittany, where it was not, salted butter became the norm. Salted butter runs through much of the Breton table, from the caramel to the pastry.

The salt

The salt marshes of Guérande lie in the south of today's Pays de la Loire region. Seawater passes through a succession of shallow basins, evaporating as it goes, until the salt concentrates and crystallizes. The coarse salt, gros sel, is known by its gray crystals, which take their color from contact with the clay. This is the gray salt, sel gris. Fleur de sel is the fine layer that forms at the surface, naturally white, and is gathered without touching the clay below. The salt workers, paludiers, still harvest by hand with traditional tools, among them the lousse, a long wooden shovel. Since 2012, both sel de Guérande and fleur de sel de Guérande have carried a protected geographical indication.

The finishing salt guide covers what different crystal shapes do on the tongue. Rustic Bakery's sel gris flatbread (shop Rustic Bakery Sel Gris Flatbread) is named for the gray salt.

The butter

Breton butter is traditionally salted, sometimes with visible crystals of sea salt. The distinction is by salt content: demi-sel butter holds between 0.5 and 3 percent salt, and beurre salé holds more than 3 percent and may contain crystals. The exemption mattered on the farm. When the gabelle came to almost the whole kingdom in the fourteenth century, the price of salt rose so far that peasants elsewhere turned from salted butter to sweet, while Bretons went on eating it salted. The kouign-amann, the caramel au beurre salé and the palet breton all depend on salted butter.

The price gap also fed a smuggling trade, faux-saunage, which became endemic on the border between Brittany and the provinces of Maine and Anjou, where people had to buy their salt from the stores of the tax farm. Smugglers carried the untaxed salt on foot and hid it in loaves of bread, in the linings of clothes and in pats of butter.

The caramel

In 1977, in the seaside town of Quiberon, the chocolatier Henri Le Roux created a caramel with Brittany's salted butter, and he is credited as the originator of caramel au beurre salé. His recipe used semi-salted butter with walnuts, hazelnuts and crushed almonds.

The caramel guide tells the longer story of cooked sugar. The salt does more than season it. A 1997 study in Nature found that salt suppresses bitterness more than it suppresses sweetness, which lets sweetness come forward. To try the idea at home, stir a pinch of gray salt into a spoon of Fat Toad Farm goat's milk caramel (shop Fat Toad Farm Goat's Milk Caramel).

The sardines

From the nineteenth century, sardine canneries spread along the Breton coast, to Douarnenez, Concarneau and Quiberon. Douarnenez went from three factories in 1860 to nearly thirty in 1880, and the women who worked in them were called, in Breton, Penn Sardin, sardine heads. In Quiberon, a family cannery has worked at Port Maria since 1921, preparing and packing its sardines by hand, and it sells vintage-dated tins, sardines millésimées.

The tinned fish history guide covers the wider story. The Breton sardine toast in the sardine toast five ways recipe pours brown butter over the fish.

The crêpes and the galettes

Buckwheat grows well in Brittany's light soils, and it gave rise to the galette, a buckwheat crêpe that became a staple food for Breton peasants. The wheat-flour crêpe, sweeter and softer, was the festive version. Cider goes beside both, and a bowlful is called a bolée.

The pastry

The kouign-amann was born in Douarnenez around 1860 and is credited to the baker Yves-René Scordia. It starts from bread dough and takes as much sugar as butter. It is folded again and again to build layers, and in the oven the butter and sugar turn into a caramelized crust that is crisp outside and soft within. The name comes from the Breton words for cake, kouign, and butter, amann. The palet breton is another Breton specialty built on salted butter, and Filet Bleu makes a pure-butter version (shop Filet Bleu Palets Bretons).

Salt, butter and sardines: a Breton timeline

When	What happened
1340s	Philippe VI makes the royal salt monopoly definitive in 1340; the gabelle reaches almost the whole kingdom by 1343.
1532	Brittany is attached to France and keeps its exemption from the salt tax.
Ancien Régime	Salt smuggling becomes endemic on the border between Brittany and Maine and Anjou.
French Revolution	The gabelle disappears.
c. 1860	The kouign-amann is born in Douarnenez, a town with three canneries that year.
1880	Douarnenez has nearly thirty canneries.
1921	A family cannery sets up at Port Maria in Quiberon.
1977	Henri Le Roux creates his caramel au beurre salé in Quiberon.
2012	Sel de Guérande and fleur de sel de Guérande receive a protected geographical indication.

Set side by side, the dates put the salted-butter habit almost four and a half centuries ahead of the caramel, from the exemption settled in 1532 to Le Roux's caramel in 1977. The sardine canneries and the kouign-amann both grew up in Douarnenez in the same decades of the nineteenth century.

The Breton table at home

Start with salted butter on good bread and a little flaky salt on top. Warm a tin of sardines in brown butter. If there is no griddle for galettes, use Rustic Bakery sel gris flatbreads. Pour a bowl of dry cider, or a sparkling tea from the non-alcoholic drinks guide. Serve palets bretons with coffee, and put caramel over something at the end. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship across the continental U.S. from theambrosianpantry.com.

See also: gifts for French food lovers, a French box built from Burgundy mustard, Paris tea and Provençal sweets.