Tis the seasoning: the difficult art of adding salt First we had to taste water seasoned with varying quantities of salt, from none up to 10g per litre, and then guess the amount. It was easy to spot the unsalted water; much harder to distinguish 2g of salt from 5g. But this precision matters because 'we need to all have the same palate at Le Manoir'. When Blanc first arrived in Britain he was appalled by the saltiness of our food: 'The British palate was messed up.' Occasionally, even now, the kitchen hires someone with too little sensitivity to salt and has to spend months retraining their palate. The second test was harder. We were given tiny ramekins of unseasoned sabayon sauce - a foamy amalgam of egg yolks and butter - and asked to season them for Monsieur Blanc to taste. It was nerve-racking. Despite the fact that the chefs spend their days tasting and seasoning, they clearly felt exposed having to season this simple little butter sauce for public judgment. Most of us flunked it. The chefs, aiming for a flavour punch, tended to over-salt it. Out of diffidence I under-seasoned mine. Just one chef, Rudi Liebenberg from Cape Town, was awarded unqualified praise from Blanc: 'Very good, very, very good!' His secret, he later told me, was a squeeze of lime. But all was not lost. Blanc took the failed sabayons and proceeded to work miracles, adding citrus juices to brighten, wasabi or mustard for heat, herbs for freshness, maybe a pinch of sugar to temper. 'Taste that - wow!' he remarked excitably, tasting a sauce he had corrected with a pinch or two of spice. 'That's what's so incredible about food - this godly alchemy.' We may not be cooking at luxury-hotel standards in our daily lives, but much of what Blanc taught these Orient-Express chefs applies to home cooking, too. Seasoning, we learnt, isn't just about salt. Beyond a certain point, adding more and more of the white stuff, as well as being unhealthy, doesn't flavour food; it deadens it. Blanc often 'seasons' an over-salty sauce with a few drops of cold water. The water brings everything down a notch and lightens it. Next time you find there's something missing in a sauce, maybe the fix you need is not salt but water.