Nature’s Seasons: The Seasoned Salt Of My Childhood

Like many children, I had some odd food habits as a kid. One of my favorite snacks—a snack I could make on my own without help from my mom and dad—only featured two ingredients: a slice of white bread and Morton’s Nature’s Seasons seasoned salt blend. I would take a slice of the soft, pliable bread, flatten it a bit with my palm, and then sprinkle the spice mix on top. No butter, no olive oil… just bread and Nature’s Seasons.

The bread was fine, of course, but the point of this snack was to indulge in the savory flavors of the spice mix, a prized blend in our home. Nature’s Seasons was always on the table next to the salt and pepper, served at every meal as a flavor enhancer, regardless of what we were eating. I enjoyed it most on carb-heavy dishes where it could really shine, where it didn’t have to fight the stronger flavors of vegetables or meat.

To me, at that point in my life, Nature’s Seasons wasn’t a way to enhance food. Rather, the food was there to simply provide a base for the seasoning mix, which understandably did not taste great on its own (I tried).

The blend is a simple combination of common spices that my mom probably put in most dishes we ate anyway: It contains salt and pepper along with sugar, celery seed, parsley and natural garlic and onion flavors. But for some reason, this specific blend, this specific ratio of spices, always, always hit the right note for me when I was a kid. I genuinely don’t remember eating anything savory without it before I reached high school.

Gradually, though, I stopped adding Nature’s Seasons to my food, opting instead for plain salt and pepper. I don’t know exactly why or when this transition occurred, but by the time I left home, I never used Nature’s Seasons. I didn’t have it in my shitty dorm room kitchen in college, nor does it have a home amongst my many containers of seasoning blends in my adult home now.

During a trip to my parent’s home, though, Nature’s Seasons reappeared in my consciousness. There it was, standing like a sentinel beside the salt and pepper mill, just waiting to be turned upside down and sprinkled over potatoes, pasta and—yes—even plain bread.

Curious about why I never used it anymore, I opened that familiar yellow container with the dark blue top (I’m pretty sure the package design hasn’t changed after all these years), laid out a piece of bread on a paper plate and added a modest dose to the freshly squished and otherwise unadorned bread.

I assumed the snack would be unappealing to my adult palate, but I could not have been more wrong. It was as blissfully salty as I remember, with a pronounced flavor of celery seed I hadn’t been able to pinpoint as a kid. The sugar didn’t make it sweet; rather, it balanced the otherwise deeply savory spice blend perfectly. The bread was soft and pillowy and made the ideal vehicle for the salty treat I had inexplicably abandoned in the back of the spice cabinet so long ago.

As we age, we let go of so much from our childhoods, eager to slough off the awkwardness of youth and embrace a grown version of ourselves that we hope will be cooler and more self-assured than our younger, more vulnerable selves. But part of the joy of growing up and becoming an adult is the opportunity to revisit the forgotten corners of our childhoods, picking up the dusty remnants of our past lives and trying them on for size.

I may have abandoned my childhood obsessions with stuffed animals and sidewalk chalk, my preoccupations with Polly Pockets and Furbies, but Nature’s Seasons, in many ways the flavor of my childhood, has always been there for me, simply waiting for me to rediscover it. All these years later, it will once again become a staple in my kitchen, every sprinkle reminding me of the happy, calm and, maybe most importantly, flavorful dinners I shared with my family during those early, blissful days of childhood.

Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.