Georgian spice-salt from the highlands of Svaneti

Salt from the highlands of Svaneti, a mountainous region in northwest Georgia, is strong and flavoursome. You can smell it before you taste it. It is used as an alternative to common salt because it can be added to almost anything – meat, fish, soup, pasta, and potatoes.

Typically it is a combination of coriander, dill, fenugreek, red capsicum (pepper), marigold flowers, cumin, white salt, and garlic. Hence, it is usually called ‘spice-salt.’

The Zeskho brand of Svanetian salt, which I bought directly in Mestia in the Svaneti province, consists of the common ingredients with tagetes flower – a variety of marigold. Tagetes include the African marigolds (Tagetes erecta), French marigolds (Tagetes patula), or the hybrid variety (Tagetes tenuifolia). Generally the commercial species (Tagetes minuta) is used to make the tagete flower oil. Tagetes minuta is sometimes called khakibush.

The social enterprise, ERTAD (Accessible Environment for Everyone), makes the Zeskho Svanetian spice-salt in support of persons with disabilities.

MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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