Salt from Fire: The Salt Makers of Enga

Once traded across Papua New Guinea and included in bride-price exchanges, Enga salt is made not from seawater but from wood, water, fire and considerable patience. Today, only a small number of salt makers continue the laborious tradition – and one of them sent me home with a seasoning that gave dinner a rather unexpected colour.

“Try it on your steak,” an elderly man in Port Moresby tells me. Then he adds, with rather more enthusiasm, “It will turn green.”

This is not the usual promise made by someone recommending a seasoning.

By then, I have carried two large bundles of Enga salt from the Highlands to Papua New Guinea’s capital. Wrapped tightly in leaves and tied to wooden sticks, they attract attention wherever I go. Most people want to know what is hidden inside. A few older residents recognise the bundles immediately. Younger people usually do not.

Grey rather than white and faintly smoky, Enga salt is made through a process involving carefully selected wood, weeks of soaking and a considerable amount of fire. Once traded over long distances and included in bride-price exchanges, it is now little known outside Enga Province; even its leaf-wrapped bundles leave many people puzzled.

As I would later discover, Enga salt also has its own ideas about what colour a steak should be.

Making Salt from a Tree

I first meet Marcus at the Enga Cultural Show. Around him, hundreds of performers wearing elaborate headdresses and richly painted bodies stamp their feet to the rhythm of kundu drums. The arena is a storm of colour, movement and sound.

Marcus, lean and wiry, appears almost oblivious to it. He is working beside a smoky fire, steadily demonstrating a craft that once made Enga famous along trading routes across Papua New Guinea. While everyone else competes for attention through feathers, paint and percussion, Marcus relies mainly on burning wood. It proves surprisingly effective.

A crowd soon gathers around him. He is one of only a handful of people still practising the traditional method of Enga salt-making, and the process is sufficiently unexpected to make ordinary table salt seem rather lazy.

“We leave tree logs in the lake for several weeks so that the salt is absorbed into the wood,” Marcus explains. “Then we dry and burn the wood, take the ashes and strain the salt.”

Not just any tree will do. Salt makers select particular species and place the logs in saline ponds around Laiagam, where they remain submerged long enough to absorb the mineral-rich water. The soaked wood is removed, dried and burned. The resulting ash is then processed to recover the salt.

It is a slow transformation: water enters the tree, fire reduces the tree to ash, and salt emerges at the end. Modern table salt arrives in a packet with a small opening at the top. Enga salt requires rather more commitment.

The finished product is not the brilliant white familiar from supermarket shelves. It is dark grey, with a distinctive smoky flavour. Marcus wraps the salt in selected local leaves – traditionally pandanus, sundu or sanga – and fastens the bundles to wooden sticks for transport and trade. The packaging is biodegradable, practical and considerably older than the marketing departments that now celebrate both qualities.

Salt on the Trading Roads

Enga is one of Papua New Guinea’s most rugged provinces, known today for the Porgera mine, the Enga Cultural Show and its distinctive sand paintings. Before commercial salt became widely available, however, the province was also renowned for this specialised craft.

Enga salt travelled through extensive exchange networks.

It was traded with communities in neighbouring Highlands provinces and along routes reaching towards the Gulf and Sepik regions. In return, Enga communities obtained steel axes and bush knives, sago, clay pots, Digaso oil and kina shells.

The salt also appeared in bride-price exchanges alongside pigs, one of the most important traditional forms of wealth in Papua New Guinea. A bundle of salt was therefore more than something to scatter over food: it represented labour, knowledge, relationships and value that could travel.

Its importance was practical as well as social. Before refrigeration, salt helped preserve meat and fish, making it possible to store food for longer periods. It also improved flavour – a modest phrase that has supported a very large global trade for thousands of years.

The Green-Steak Experiment

Back in Port Moresby, I finally decide to test the warning. I unwrap one of my precious bundles, season a steak and watch carefully.

The man was right. The meat develops a distinctly green cast.

There are moments in cooking when confidence is essential. This is one of them. I remind myself that the salt was made by an expert, that several people had spoken about it with affection and that colour is not everything. Then I eat the steak.

It is delicious: smoky, mineral and far more complex than ordinary table salt. Visually, it would not win every dinner guest, but flavour makes a persuasive defence. I finish the meal with no regrets and a new appreciation for seasoning that doubles as a conversation piece.

I cannot say with certainty what caused the colour change. The green steak remains an observation rather than a scientific conclusion – and perhaps that is for the best. Some culinary mysteries are easier to enjoy before laboratory analysis.

A Tradition Worth Keeping

Cheap commercial salt has replaced traditional salt in much of Papua New Guinea. The change is understandable: industrially produced salt is inexpensive, consistent and requires neither weeks of soaking nor the destruction of a carefully selected tree.

Convenience, however, has a cost. As demand declined, so did the number of people able and willing to maintain the Enga method. What disappears is not only a product but a chain of knowledge: which trees to choose, where to soak them, how long to wait, how to manage the fire and how to recognise when the salt is ready.

Elsewhere, renewed interest in artisan foods has helped revive traditional salt-making communities. Enga salt has many of the qualities modern diners claim to value: it is handmade, local, distinctive and connected to a specific landscape and history. It even arrives wrapped in leaves, having solved the plastic-packaging problem before anyone thought to call it sustainable design.

For now, Marcus continues the work. Amid the drums and dancing of the Enga Show, he tends his fire, explains the process and places another dark bundle of salt into someone’s hands.

Perhaps one day Enga salt will appear on restaurant tables across Papua New Guinea. The chefs may simply need to warn diners about the colour of their steak.