You're correct about the potato. However, I was referring to the general technique, not the particular object. At 09:52 AM 9/30/2005, Mike Stay wrote:

On 9/30/05, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

...

As an aside, I recently saw a show on Italian cooking on cable TV, and the cook used the change in density of salt water to approximate the correct salinity for a salt broth. She put a potato into the water, and added enough salt until the potato started to float. That was the correct amount for her recipe. Something tells me that this technique was probably used for thousands of years. Except that the potato is from the New World. Anyone know if Andean indians use salt broths in their traditional cooking? -- Mike Stay metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike