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Spiced Salt for Turkey and Chicken
Take half an ounce each of the following--they can generally be bought ready ground, but if not, must be dried, pounded and sifted: Nutmegs. Mace. Thyme. Marjoram. Basil--and one ounce each of Cloves. Pepper--and a quarter ounce of Bay leaves--and mix them with 4 pounds of fine salt.
It is not recommended to persons making a galantine only occasionally to experiment with spice flavors, which after all may not be appreciated as well as the natural flavor of the fowl, yet where such cold dishes appear constantly and where everything is highly seasoned the spices become as necessary to the cook as the common sausage seasonings to the butcher. The following is the French pork-butcher's compound:
A dry seasoning salt in the French charcutier's manner, meant for galantines, forcemeats and cold poultry dishes. The proportions are given by weight and scale down cleanly.
- The ratio, in plain termsThe spices total 4.75 oz against 64 oz of salt, roughly 7 percent by weight. For a manageable batch, divide everything by four: 1 lb fine salt, about 1/8 oz each ground nutmeg, mace, thyme, marjoram and basil, 1/4 oz each cloves and pepper, and 1/16 oz ground bay. Weigh rather than measure by spoon; ground spices vary enormously in density.
- Weigh, do not scoopHalf an ounce of ground mace is a large volume; half an ounce of ground cloves is small. A kitchen scale that reads in grams is the only reliable way to hit these proportions — 14 g for the half-ounce items, 28 g for the ounce items, 7 g for the bay.
- Fine saltSimply finely milled salt; the recipe specifies no more than that. Plain fine sea salt or a fine-grain kosher salt works. Note that this is a plain salt-and-spice blend with no curing agents in it.
- Herbs must be bone dryThyme, marjoram and basil have to be fully dried before pounding, or the mix will cake and eventually mould. If starting from dried leaf herbs, grind and sift out the stalks — sifting is not fussiness here, it is what keeps the blend pourable.
- BayA quarter ounce of ground bay is assertive. Whole dried bay leaves are difficult to reduce to powder in a mortar; a spice grinder or a clean coffee mill handles them, and the powder should be sieved to remove the leathery midribs.
- StorageYields a little over 4 lb. Keep it in a sealed jar away from light. Ground spice loses aroma within a few months, so unless a kitchen genuinely turns out cold dishes constantly — the case Whitehead makes in his own text — make a quarter batch.
- How much to useThe original gives no dosage. A common modern guide for forcemeats is somewhere around 15-18 g of seasoned salt per kilogram of meat, which would put the salt itself at roughly 1.4-1.7 percent. Season a small test patty, cook it through and taste before committing a whole galantine.
- The unfinished sentenceThe entry breaks off at "The following is the French pork-butcher's compound:" — a second, separate formula follows in the book. What is printed above is complete in itself.
Seasoning salts of this kind are the sel épicé or épices composées of French charcuterie, mixed in advance so that pâtés, galantines and sausage meats could be seasoned consistently by weight rather than by guess. Jessup Whitehead, a Chicago hotel cook who wrote a shelf of trade manuals in the 1880s and 1890s, was writing for American hotel and restaurant kitchens then absorbing French method wholesale, and his aside is characteristic: he is candid that an occasional galantine is better off tasting of the bird than of cloves, and that a compound like this earns its place only where cold buffet work is constant. The comparison he reaches for — the butcher's sausage seasoning — was the nearest thing his American readers already knew. Escoffier would later publish his own version of the same idea, and formulas of this shape, heavy on pepper and cloves with nutmeg and mace behind them, remain standard in charcuterie today.