Nov 13 2006
salting your food before tasting it
My hubby and I watched an amusing episode of Chef! about this and he told me a story that turned out to be an urban legend about a person on a job interview being rejected because they salted their food before tasting it.
I was thinking about this myself because a friend of mine totally does this. No matter what is put in front of her or who made it, without tasting it, she always puts a ton of salt on it. When she does it while she’s out to dinner, I couldn’t care less, but when she came over to dinner and did it with our cooking, I really was insulted. It’s one thing to take a bite and decide to put salt on it after tasting, but to salt it without even a single taste? My little cousins do this with corn on the cob and we don’t even put salt out anymore for this reason. We already salted the corn and since salt is no good for them, they certainly don’t need more without even tasting it first.
An etiquette site said not to have salt out on the table, because if salt is on the table, the implication is that the person is welcome to salt it. We hardly ever have salt and pepper out for the simple reason that, if we are cooking our own food, we already know there is enough salt or pepper in it and it doesn’t occur to us to put it out for guests. Now the big exception to this is veggies because everyone likes them differently so if the meal is meat and veggies, salt away. But if I have made a recipe of some sort, at least taste it before you salt the heck out of it.
The basis of the urban legend, though, is that you can tell a lot about a person’s personality by this action. I hate to say it, but it’s totally true. This aforementioned friend is very set in her ways to the point where it takes a really long time to convince her of even really obvious things if she was told the opposite first. She never tries new things or gives the other person’s opinion a chance, she just comes in with her own pre-set ideas of what things should be.
Honestly, urban legend or no, if I was eating with someone on a job interview and they salted before even tasting, I wouldn’t hire them either so maybe there is some truth in it afterall.
Hillary is an award winning playwright, fiction and non-fiction author best known for her play, The Love of Three Oranges which has been performed around the world. A Script Frenzy and NaNoWriMo ML, she loves connecting with other writers no matter what their experience levels. For the business side of blogging, publishing and selling, visit Hillary at The Whine Seller. See a complete list of Hillary’s blogs and books here.
