A spoiled, aristocratic houseguest in an old French film insists on only sea salt, sprinkled on after the food has been cooked.

The brief scene stuck with me, partly because I laughed at the chef's reaction: "She can eat like everyone else," he says. "Diets I can accept, but not obsessions."

But I could also understand an obsession with a particular salt. I love salt—on food, rather than in it. It doesn't have to be a lot. A few fl akes are enough. I just like to see them and feel them. And I am not alone. Salt is both the oldest and newest thing in food. The trend now is to use hand-harvested, natural, and smoked salts and sprinkle them on top, or at the very end of cooking, and eat the salt before it has a chance to dissolve.

"I think most people are looking for that quality, for a salt that doesn't dissolve into food," says Rob Seideman, a Colorado chef and consultant who started Salt Traders in 2002 to sell all the exotic salts he was fi nding around the world.

"At that one lucky moment, you bite into that salt crystal and it just sends a wonderful burst of saltiness in your mouth," Seideman says. For a start, open a jar of fl eur de sel—literally, the salt "bloom" that forms atop shallow pools of seawater along the Ile de Re, off the coast of France. This salt is pretty easy to fi nd in Baltimore groceries that sell gourmet foods. So delicate, it's used even in desserts and candies.

Or try Celtic gray salt, with its irregular crystals and fl akes, residue of seawater with a kind of lunar hue. For more color and texture, try Peruvian pink salt, Cyprus black salt fl akes, Hawaiian Red Alaea salt, and the apricot-colored Australian Murray River salt fl akes. Some salts are fl akes, some are crystals, and the sizes of the fl akes and crystals vary. Texture is everything, Seideman says, because the fl avors of the salts are not that different.

But there is one exception—smoked salts. For deep fl avor, try the salt that started it all: Danish Viking-Smoked Salt, made by a Dane who rekindled his ancestors' method of letting seawater evaporate from an iron vessel over a fire.

While it can be a challenge to find some of these specialty salts locally, energetic and passionate salt sellers are working hard to change that. In Baltimore, Barbara Lahnstein, owner of Neopol Savory Smokery in Belvedere Square Market, has added a line of salts to the other smoked delicacies she features. In her red smokery, trays of California sea salt that have been wet down with oils and herbs, like lemon and rosemary, slowly develop fl avor over smoldering logs of maple or cherry wood.

For Lahnstein, salt is a return to purity of fl avor, of using an ancient mineral to bring out the true flavor of a fresh meat or vegetable.

She remembers standing in a gourmet store in New York, looking at a dizzying array of foods and fl avorings.

"I almost got sick. It's overwhelming," she said. "There is so much out there. But what is the thing that everyone has in the kitchen?

Salt … and pepper."

She tasted smoked salts and thought she could do much better. That is, she added more flavorings, such as red wine and juniper berry.

I started my own salt odyssey at Neopol with a sampling of fi ve different smoked salts, with a quick stop at Ceriello Fine Foods next door for fresh chicken breasts, a steak, and some ground beef. I went home and turned on the electric grill.

The red wine and juniper berry smoked salt was perfect for the steak and burgers, sprinkled on just before grilling. The chipotle-lime smoked salt gave the chicken breast a fl avor that did not scream southwest, but hinted at it, and it worked great the next day, cold, added to a salad dressed with cilantro lime dressing.

Neopol's lemon-rosemary smoked salt was just right for potatoes cut into medium chunks and roasted for thirty minutes. I also roasted other vegetables—eggplant, fennel, and caulifl ower—on which I sprinkled a salt-and-herb blend I saw at the butcher counter in Ceriello.

With nothing but salt, meat, potatoes, and vegetables, I had an incredible dinner on the table in thirty minutes.

I have never been more ready for a food craze. I'm putting salt on everything and buying just about anything that has it—artisan butters, a chocolate bar, and even luxury caramels.

Chocolate with gray sea salt sounded weird even to me. I probably would not have bought it for myself, but my husband slipped a $6.99 chocolate bar purchased at Ma Petite Shoe in Hampden into my Christmas stocking. This Barcelona Bar, by Vosges Haut-Chocolat, was out of this world.

The French have always valued good sea salts. Jocelyne DiRuggiero, a microbiologist who lives in Mount Washington, usually brings home a few jars of fl eur de sel whenever she visits her native Lyon, France.

"In France, it's one-tenth the price," she says, but admits to spending several dollars here at Wegmans in Hunt Valley for French artisan butter that has crystals of fl eur de sel in it. I found a similar butter made by the Vermont Butter & Cheese Company at Eddie's of Roland Park on Charles Street for $7.99 for the equivalent of one stick— except it was in a pretty round wood basket. You can't think of this as standard "lightly salted" butter.

"It's more like the price of a very good cheese," DiRuggiero says.

When I told DiRuggiero a few days later about the Peruvian pink salt I ordered from Salt Traders, it was the fi rst she'd heard of it.

But she knew exactly what made it pink. Seideman had already told me that it was something naturally occurring, which he didn't understand fully. He knew one thing—unlike the red clay deposits in the Hawaiian red salt, and the activated charcoal that makes the Cyprus salt black—the pink color does not sink to the bottom when you dissolve Peruvian salt in a glass of water.

DiRuggiero smiled with recognition. The pink comes from Halobacterium, a salt-loving singlecelled micro-organism classified as Archaea. DiRuggiero studies DNA repair mechanisms and genome evolution in Archaea, and she is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

In case you are wondering: Yes, the halobacteria could rehydrate if you sprinkle pink salt on something moist. And yes, it is completely harmless. Halobacterium is, in fact, what makes a flamingo pink, hon.