salt holder

[chezcherie]

after a cooking class last week, i was chatting with students, and one was asking about salt pigs---you know, the kinda periscope-shaped vessels that are supposed to keep salt from clumping. one of the women (i didn't know her, so can't track her down) mentioned that she grew up with little vessels that were shaped like a prone woman, with a depression in the belly for the salt. i'm fairly certain she said this was in mexico...she said they were hand-crafted, but were everywhere. boy, i'd love to get one...or twelve. anyone familiar? thanks in advance--they sound just marvelous!

[SuzySushi]

You mean like a Chac Mool? The depressions in the belly of the full-size statues were originally meant to hold human sacrifices! (So I found out after a friend and I happily posed by the famous Chac Mool in Mexico City's National Musem of Anthropology thinking it looked "cute"! ) You should be able to find one at a shop or site that sells museum replicas.

[Pontormo]

You mean like a Chac Mool? The depressions in the belly of the full-size statues were originally meant to hold human sacrifices! (So I found out after a friend and I happily posed by the famous Chac Mool in Mexico City's National Musem of Anthropology thinking it looked "cute"!    ) You should be able to find one at a shop or site that sells museum replicas.

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Careful, though. This is the kind of association grafted onto objects by early "explorers", amateurs and outsiders to the culture with misconceptions of what heathens did before Europeans brought civilization from the Old World to the New. Cf. Cecilia Klein, Mary Ellen Miller among other scholars. I'll make this short since it has little to do w culinary matters (unless someone once decided that hearts were torn out of sacrifices and salted before being fed to idols), but some of the earliest perpetuators of these myths were Franciscan missionaries wishing to justify the means they chose to convert pagans.