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Soup Powder (Take of lemon peel thyme sweet)
Take of lemon peel, thyme, sweet marjoram and parsley each one ounce. Dry carefully on paper in a warm oven, then pound in a mortar and rub through a fine sieve. Add one drachm (one teaspoonful) of powdered celery seed, bottle and cork.
One teaspoonful of this may be added to each quart of soup.
A dry seasoning blend rather than a dish — the sort of thing a cook kept bottled beside the salt. A few of the measures and the drying step need translating.
- A drachmThe apothecaries' drachm is one-eighth of an ounce, about 1/8 oz by weight; the recipe's own gloss of "one teaspoonful" is close enough for celery seed and is what to follow.
- Ounces are weight, not volumeEach herb is one ounce weighed. One ounce of fresh parsley or thyme is a generous handful of leaves and stems; one ounce of lemon peel is the zest of roughly three to four lemons. The recipe assumes fresh herbs, since dried ones need no drying.
- "A warm oven" for dryingThis means low, residual heat rather than baking heat: the lowest setting your oven will hold, door propped, or a dehydrator. Too much heat drives off the volatile oils in thyme and marjoram and browns the lemon peel, which loses the point of the blend.
- Zest onlyPare the peel thin and leave the white pith behind. Pith dries hard, will not pass the sieve, and turns bitter in storage.
- Pounding and sievingA mortar works but a spice grinder or clean coffee mill is faster. Sieve, then regrind the coarse residue rather than discarding it — the stems hold flavour. A fine sieve matters because unsifted fragments float in clear soup.
- Add the celery seed after dryingCelery seed is already dry and highly aromatic; putting it through the oven with the fresh herbs wastes it. Grind it separately and stir in at the end, as written.
- Yield and strengthFour ounces of fresh herbs dry down to a much smaller volume of powder, but still enough to season many quarts of soup at the stated rate of a teaspoon per quart. Halve or quarter the quantities unless you cook soup constantly, and taste as you go.
- StorageCork tightly and keep dark and cool. Ground herbs fade within three or four months, and this mixture contains no salt or preservative — dry the herbs thoroughly or the bottle will cake and go musty.
Bottled seasoning powders like this one belong to a long tradition of "kitchen pepper" and soup herb mixtures that runs through English and American household books from the eighteenth century onward, kept ready-made because gathering and drying herbs was seasonal work and a cook wanted July's marjoram available in January. The particular combination here -- lemon peel with thyme, marjoram, parsley and celery seed -- reads as a dry relative of the bouquet garni with an added acid-aromatic note of citrus, useful in soups that lacked a strong meat stock and needed all the built-in savour they could get.