Salt

Salt is sodium chloride (NaCl), the one rock that humans eat and the most fundamental seasoning in the kitchen — the reference point for the salty taste itself. It comes from evaporated seawater or brine (sea and table salt) and from mined underground deposits of ancient dried seas (rock salt, or halite), but however it is won it is essentially the same simple compound. Its "flavour" is pure salty taste with almost no aroma at all; what it does in cooking is far larger than how it tastes on its own, because a pinch seasons, sharpens and lifts nearly everything else.