Salt: Magical Salt "I love you more than salt," the mythical young princess says to her father. Her older sisters, articulate in their hyperbole--more than gold, they tell the king, more than my own life, as much as God--are rewarded with riches and kingdoms of their own. The arrogant king, devastated to be so poorly valued by his favorite child, condemns her to a life of loneliness and poverty in exile. The king's next meal is flat and tasteless, and so is the next, and the next, and the next. For thirty days, his food lacks flavor. You might conclude that it is sadness and loss that eclipse his pleasure, but it is not. He summons his chef and demands an explanation. "You value salt so little, your majesty," the chef explains coyly, "that I no longer use it in your food.

" You can see where this is going. The princess is returned from exile, reunited with her secret fiance--the wily chef, of course--and given a lavish wedding and riches that far surpass those granted her sisters. The king's food sparkles with taste and savor once again. I was told the story by a cooking student, a woman from India who remembered it from childhood, when she had likely heard it from an English nanny; there are many versions of this tale throughout Europe. Common salt is more essential than we like to admit, each version cautions us. Another scene: It is Halloween, the eve of el Dia de los Muertos, and a young Mexican girl is boiling an egg. After it is cooked, she runs it under a cool spigot, holding the hot egg even as it burns her impatient hands. When at last it is cool, she removes the shell and carefully breaks the egg in half, revealing the round yellow yolk, the kernel of life at the core, which she quickly discards.

She lifts the lid of a nearby box of salt and takes as big a pinch as her fingers can hold, depositing it in the hollow of the egg. She continues, pinch after salty pinch, until the center of the egg is filled. She fits the halves together and tiptoes silently to the bedroom she shares with her sister, where she awaits the stroke of midnight. Eventually, the hour comes, she puts the egg with its hidden seed, its talismanic treasure, into her mouth, chewing and swallowing quickly so that the jewel of salt does not burst and leave her parched, for she must not take a drink. Her sister wakes and calls her name, but she pretends to be asleep. To speak would break the spell. Who will it be? Who will appear in her dreams and offer her a quenching drink of water? Her life's mate, the story goes, and she falls asleep imagining his face. Ah, magical salt.

It seasons our tales, and spices up our language, each word, every phrase a nod to a single truism: Life is tasteless without salt. Pepper: The King of Spice Salt is indispensable. The earth is cloaked in salt; a salty tide moves within us, too, every moment lapping at the edges of our cells. Without it, we die. Pepper is superfluous. Salt's culinary spouse is expendable, entirely unnecessary for existence (the ideal marriage, one partner frivolous, one keeping the house afloat). It is a gift, a luxury that we have come to take utterly for granted. "Saltandpepper" is nearly a single word in our kitchen vocabulary and the thought of doing without the pepper part is all but inconceivable.

But should something occur to put pepper absolutely out of reach, we could live. We would mourn its loss, and with every bite be aware of its absence. But we would live. In the end, we might get over the loss of pepper without too lengthy a struggle. We have no innate physical longing for it, as we do for salt. We delight in the presence of pepper in our food, but the memory of its taste would fade in a single generation; we cannot pass sensory knowledge to our children, we can only entice them with descriptions, always inadequate when it comes t.