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Gravy, Seasoning For
Put one ounce and a half of white pepper into a mortar, with half an ounce of mace, one ounce of nutmeg, a quarter of an ounce of cayenne, a salt-spoonful of ginger, and the same of cassia. Pound, and mix thoroughly. Put the powder into a small bottle, and keep it closely corked, or the strength and flavour will escape. A pinch of this powder will season half a pint of gravy.
A dry seasoning powder rather than a dish: a house blend to be kept bottled and used a pinch at a time. The weights are avoirdupois ounces, so a kitchen scale is the shortest route to it.
- The weights in metric1½ oz white pepper is about 42 g, ½ oz mace about 14 g, 1 oz nutmeg about 28 g, and ¼ oz cayenne about 7 g. Total yield is roughly 90 g of powder.
- Salt-spoonfulThe salt-spoon was the small spoon that sat in an open salt cellar, and a level one holds about a quarter of a teaspoon. Use that for both the ginger and the cassia.
- CassiaCassia is the thick, hard bark sold in most shops simply as cinnamon; true Ceylon cinnamon is thinner and milder. Either works here, but cassia is what the book means and is the stronger of the two.
- Mace and nutmegBoth come from the same fruit, mace being the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed. Buy mace as whole blades and nutmeg whole, and grate or grind them yourself; pre-ground mace loses its point within months.
- GrindingA mortar will handle blade mace and peppercorns, but nutmeg is dense enough to be worth grating on a microplane first, or the pounding takes a long time. An electric spice mill does the whole lot in under a minute; pulse rather than run it, since heat drives off the volatile oils.
- Why the tight cork mattersThe instruction about corking closely is the practical hinge. Ground pepper, mace and nutmeg are all volatile-oil spices and go flat fast; a small jar filled nearly to the top, kept dark and cool, holds its strength for a few months rather than a year.
- DosageA pinch to half a pint (roughly 280 ml) of gravy is a light hand, which is right given the cayenne and the nutmeg. Season at the end of cooking and taste, as the cayenne continues to assert itself in a hot liquid.
This blend belongs to a long English tradition of the standing house spice: a mixture made up once and kept bottled on the shelf, so that a cook could season a sauce, a forcemeat or a made dish without opening six containers. Earlier cookery books call such mixtures "kitchen pepper" or "spice for sauces", and the pepper-heavy, mace-and-nutmeg profile here is recognisably descended from those eighteenth-century versions. The choice of white rather than black pepper is deliberate in a book of this period: pale gravies and white sauces were expected to show no dark specks. The blend's very existence is a reminder that a Victorian kitchen worked on volume and repetition, where a single well-labelled bottle saved a great deal of weighing.