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Sweet Spice, Pastrycook's
This is made by mixing together two parts of sugar, one part of cassia, one part of nutmeg, one part of mace, and the same of cloves.
A blending formula rather than a dish: a sweetened mixed spice of the type kept in a jar on the pastry bench for puddings, buns and mincemeat. The only real decisions are whether you work by weight and how finely you grind.
- Read "parts" as weightFormulas of this kind were most likely worked by weight, and spices differ wildly in bulk density — a spoonful of ground mace weighs far less than a spoonful of sugar. By weight the ratio is 2:1:1:1:1, so 100 g sugar with 50 g each of cassia, nutmeg, mace and cloves.
- A small batch is plentyScaled down to 40 g sugar and 20 g of each spice you get roughly a cupful, which is more sweet spice than a household is likely to get through quickly. Cloves and mace dominate quickly, so start small and blend again when it fades.
- Cassia is not quite cinnamonCassia is the thick, dark, hard bark sold in most supermarkets simply as "cinnamon"; true Ceylon cinnamon is paler, flakier and much milder. The recipe wants the stronger, blunter cassia flavour, so the ordinary jar labelled ground cinnamon is right here.
- Mace and nutmeg are the same fruitMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed and tastes lighter and more floral; using nutmeg for both, as is sometimes suggested, flattens the mixture. Buy blades of mace if you can and grind them with the sugar, which stops them clogging the mill.
- Grind together, sift, regrindWhole spices ground fresh are the whole point of making this rather than buying it. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve and put anything coarse back through the mill — gritty cassia bark and clove heads will not soften in a pudding.
- The sugar is not just sweeteningIt acts as a carrier and a grinding aid, and makes the blend easy to dose by the teaspoon. Caster or granulated both work; icing sugar contains starch and may dull the aroma.
- StorageGround cloves, mace and cassia lose their top notes fast. Keep it in a small airtight jar away from the stove and treat six months as the useful life; the sugar will draw damp in a warm kitchen.
- How to use itAbout a teaspoon per pound of fruit or per pound of flour is a fair starting dose for mincemeat, spice cake, baked apples or a milk pudding. Because it is already sweetened, subtract nothing from the recipe's sugar at these quantities.
Sweet spice was a bench staple rather than a household one: pastrycooks mixed their own so that a single scoop would season a batch of buns or mincemeat consistently, and formulas like this are generally said to have circulated in trade manuals long before pre-blended "mixed spice" and "pudding spice" appeared on grocers' shelves. The choice of cassia, nutmeg, mace and cloves broadly reflects what is usually described as the medieval European sweet-spice palette, narrowed by what the nineteenth-century colonial trade supplied cheaply and in quantity han expensexpensive aromatics, they are what tends to define what "spiced" tastes like in English baking. The formula reads as a preparation to have ready in advance, one of the standing mixtures for the store cupboard.