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Seasoning for Forcemeat and Game and Meat Pies
Take two ounces of dried thyme, an ounce of marjoram, an ounce of rosemary, and two ounces of bay-leaves. Pound these in a mortar, and pass the powder through a hair sieve. Pound separately two ounces of cloves, two ounces of black pepper, and one ounce of cayenne, mix these with the powdered herbs, and add four ounces of grated nutmeg. Weigh the powder, and add to it four times its weight in dried salt. Put it into small bottles, cork these securely, and put them in a dry place till wanted. When mixed with salt in this proportion, one ounce of seasoning will flavour three pounds of forcemeat.
A dry spiced salt to be made in bulk and kept on hand, in the manner of the French épices fines. The proportions are the whole point: everything is pegged to the weight of the finished spice powder, not to the individual quantities.
- Do the salt arithmetic before you startThe herbs and spices come to 15 oz, so four times that weight is 60 oz of salt — nearly 4 lb, for a finished mix of about 4 lb 11 oz. That is a jar large enough to season roughly 225 lb of forcemeat. Scale to a tenth (about 3 g each of marjoram and rosemary, 6 g each thyme and bay, 6 g each clove and black pepper, 3 g cayenne, 11 g nutmeg, then 170 g salt) and you will still have plenty.
- "Dried salt"The recipe does not say how; spreading salt in a thin layer, drying it in a low oven and letting it cool is one way to stop the mix caking in the bottle. Use fine plain salt without iodine or anticaking agents; coarse crystals will sift out to the bottom and the seasoning will no longer be even.
- A hair sieveA fine-mesh sieve of woven horsehair. Any fine nylon or stainless sieve does the job. Sift the herbs, then tip the woody stalk fragments and bay ribs that refuse to pass into the compost rather than forcing them through.
- Grind whole, not pre-groundCloves, black pepper and nutmeg lose most of their aroma within weeks of grinding, and this mixture is meant to sit in the cupboard for months. Buy whole and use a spice mill or mortar; nutmeg is best grated last and stirred in, as the original directs, because it clogs a grinder.
- The herbs must be bone dryThyme, marjoram, rosemary and bay have to be brittle enough to powder. Anything still leathery will hold moisture, cake the salt and eventually spoil the jar. Rosemary and bay are both assertive and may well dominate the finished smell.
- Rate of useOne ounce to three pounds of forcemeat works out at about 1.6 to 1.7 per cent salt by weight of meat — a normal, well-seasoned level for sausage and stuffing. If your recipe already calls for salt, leave it out and use this instead, or you will double up.
- Heat levelThe single ounce of cayenne is diluted across roughly 75 ounces of mixture, so the effect on a stuffing is warmth rather than heat. Judge it by tasting a fried spoonful of seasoned forcemeat before you fill a pie.
- KeepingSmall bottles, tightly corked, kept dark and dry, as instructed; small bottles have the advantage that each is opened only briefly. Expect the aroma to fade noticeably after six months even so.
Mixtures of this kind sit in a long European tradition of compound spice powders — the épice fine or sel épicé of French professional kitchens, kept ready-weighed so that a cook filling a raised game pie or a batch of veal forcemeat need not measure seven separate jars. It belongs to the large Victorian household, where forcemeat balls, stuffings and cold game pies were routine rather than occasional, and it is a standing preparation rather than a dish. The heavy weighting toward clove, nutmeg and bay reflects the flavour profile British cookery expected of potted and pie meats through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the cayenne is the newer element, and the four-to-one salt dilution serves two ends at once, seasoning the meat while making a strong spice blend much harder to overdose by accident.