Karen Barnaby: Cultivating the savoury sprinkle

Initiation into the cult of the savoury sprinkle was gifted to me by the mother of the owner of a restaurant I was working at in the late 1970s.
His mother arrived one day with a salad of chopped tomatoes, cucumber, onion, a mountain of coarsely chopped parsley, toasted shards of pita bread in a lemony dressing. From a small jar, she sprinkled on a generous layer of a reddish green spice mix. I tasted the salad and was floored by the flavour and texture.
The pita was nutty and crunchy, and the s