Of all the recipes I’ve posted to Fine Cooking‘s Web site so far this summer, I can think of relatively few that don’t call for salt: table, sea, or Kosher. The sodium-chloride duo brings out the best in our dishes, from thoroughly American Pot Pies to Vietnamese Pho, and just about everything else in between.

Linda Miller Nicholson, the vivacious proprietor of SaltySeattle.com, has recognized the power of salt and harnessed it to throw an ever so vogue fête. She records the party set-up on her blog:

I lined my dining table with over 60 empty vessels and assigned each one a corresponding number. We created a master list on the ipad that contained each number, then, when attendees brought salt, they simply chose a vessel, told us the number, and we catalogued each salt into the secret master list. This way the tasting was truly blind. I raided my own global collection of salt and filled roughly twenty of the vessels, and once all the guests had proffered their hand-selected salts, we had 63 samples. 

Sounds like a great time. Those of us who have not been lucky enough to receive an invitation to a salt-tasting should take initiative and follow Nicholson’s lead, or at least branch out and add a few different salts to our everyday gastronomy.