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Low-salt recipes now appear routinely in newspapers and women's magazines. Special desalinated cookery tomes exist to meet all pocketbooks, if not all palates. They tend to be heavily sprinkled with garlic and pepper. All make clear that there is more to low-salt life than just throwing away the salt shaker. Craig Claiborne's Gourmet Diet Book and Eleanor Brenner's Gourmet Cooking Without Salt are probably the most sophisticated guides going. They provide recipes for such things as low-salt pâtés, soufflés and exotica like Baba Ghanouj (eggplant with sesame paste). The most ferocious anti-salt volume is Killer Salt by Marietta Whittlesey. Published in 1977 and still selling, it is not merely a cookbook but a polemic. It warns about salt addiction and threatens readers with "hypogeusia" (having dull taste buds) from oversalting. One of the most down-to-earth entries is an American Heart Association book, Cooking Without Your Salt Shaker. A sample recipe: mock sour cream, made with lemon juice, skim milk, onion powder and unsalted dry cottage cheese. The most convivial way of becoming an ex-saltaholic is in a course, in a group large enough so :hat members can pass along useful hints and discoveries. One such class is given at the Frances Stern Nutrition Center at Tufts University in Boston. In six hours, for $105 (covered by Blue Cross if prescribed by a doctor), the course takes up cooking techniques, label deciphering, entertaining and low-salt stratagems for eating out. Course Director Carol Stollar hands out lists of restaurants that will cook low-sodium meals if asked. Her counsel to the students: don't avoid restaurants, just find those that are accommodating and "learn to be pleasantly assertive."
Don Jackson, 48, a Boston hospital administrator with mild hypertension, found the course changed his life. In no time at all, he became a man for all substitute seasonings, especially angostura bitters, cumin, vinegar, vermouth and table wine (cooking wine contains salt). He learned to read labels like a lawyer going over a contract. "Now when I go to a grocery store," says Jackson, "I know what all those words mean." He discovered, for instance, that consumers must look out for the words soda and brine, as well as for salt and sodium. "Tuna in water" means "tuna in water and salt." Tomato paste and canned tomatoes, ingredients for his favorite homemade spaghetti sauce, turned out to be dangerous. So he took to raising his own tomatoes in the backyard, parboiling, then freezing them for use later. He learned to skip ham, cured meats and gravies and to use tabasco sauce (24 mg per teaspoon) in place of Worcestershire (69 mg per teaspoon). Baked potatoes become a standby. Concludes another student in Don Jackson's course: "It means really cooking at home a lot, and goodbye to TV dinners and chili from a can."