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French Sausage Spice
Mix together in a mortar five pounds of ground black pepper, two and one-half pounds of ground ginger, one pound each of ground nutmegs and cloves and one-half pound each of ground anise-seed and coriander-seeds. Preserve in a well-corked bottle.
This is a bulk seasoning blend from a hotel kitchen that made sausage by the hundredweight — eleven pounds of spice in one batch. The ratios are the useful part; the quantities are not.
- Scale by partsThe proportions reduce cleanly to 10 parts black pepper, 5 ginger, 2 nutmeg, 2 clove, 1 anise-seed, 1 coriander, by weight (10½ lb in all). Volume is not a strict substitute for weight, since the spices differ in density, but measured in tablespoons — 10 pepper, 5 ginger, 2 nutmeg, 2 clove, 1 anise, 1 coriander — you get roughly a cup and a third.
- This is not a cureThe blend contains no salt, no sugar and no nitrite. It is a flavouring only, added on top of whatever salt and cure a sausage recipe specifies — do not treat it as a complete sausage mix.
- How much to useThe recipe gives no dosing rate. As a modern starting point, a pepper-forward blend of this kind is commonly used at roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons per pound of meat, with salt figured separately at about 1.5 to 2 percent of the meat weight; the original says nothing either way.
- Grind fresh where it countsPre-ground nutmeg and clove fade noticeably over a few months, and this mixture is heavy in both. Grating the nutmeg and grinding the cloves and coriander yourself makes a real difference in aroma; commercially ground pepper and ginger are acceptable.
- The mortar's real jobEverything here is already ground, so the pounding is presumably for blending rather than further reduction: working out clumps in the ginger and clove and distributing the small quantities of anise evenly through the bulk.