Kinsler: Or maybe we should use sea water
The Teutonic dishwasher is at long last installed. It’s very nice, just what Natalie wanted, with a stainless-steel interior suitable for testing firearms. The snazzy interior concealed three compartments: one for dishwasher detergent (we use Cascade pods) plus another for rinse solution, (already in the pods,) and big compartment for salt.
Yup, salt. Preferably special German dishwasher salt. Of course, you Americans should have known this, for how could you have an automatic dishwasher without an exorbitantly-priced supply of imported German salt?
No, sez the booklet, you cannot, shall not, nein, nein, ever place your morally-dissolute American table salt into the sacred chamber. Only our Deutchlander salt, from the mines of Salzburg.*
Yeah. I looked up “dishwasher salt” on Google, and it seems that European dishwashers contain, of all things, a water softener, lest our ferocious dishwasher detergent, which can dissolve a radial tire, somehow prove inadequate for the job. The salt is used as it is in every other water softener, to which it supplies friendly sodium ions to replace the evil calcium hard-water ions. (Fun fact: Lancaster’s city water, though free of fluoride due to unfortunate politics many years ago, goes through a gigantic softener before it’s pumped into the town’s water mains, yielding a hardness of 128ppm.)
Natalie gave the salt-rant section of the five-language dishwasher instruction booklet a dismissive sniff worthy of her Calabrese-Pittsburgh mother, the formidable four-foot-ten Caterina Kunzolo, and loaded up the evening’s dishes without a twinge of either regret or Special German Dishwasher salt.
Except for the fact that the new machine is so quiet it’s spooky, the dishes are sparkling.
But I’m afraid to mention that, her mother notwithstanding, my beloved has ordered a sack of Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg brand Certified Dishwasher Salt** from Amazon.com. I suppose we can use it to de-ice our front steps this winter.
*Which is in Austria. **I made this up, but let me know if you see it at Kroger.
Mark Kinsler, kinsler33@gmail.com, still lives and breathes in our old house in Lancaster under the supervision and care of Natalie and the two striped supervisors.
This article originally appeared on Lancaster Eagle-Gazette: Kinsler: New dishwasher installed, but 'dishwasher salt' not needed
