My father taught me to cook the way other fathers teach fishing — patiently, and mostly by getting it wrong in front of me first.
"Salt is the only ingredient that admits when it's been forgotten," he used to say, tasting a stew with the same furrowed concentration he brought to crossword puzzles. "Everything else just quietly fails."
After he left, I oversalted everything for almost a year. I have never decided if it was grief or habit, or if, by then, there was a difference.