Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › French Spice
French Spice
Mix together one-half ounce of thyme and bay-leaves, and one-fourth ounce each of marjoram and rosemary; place the herbs on a sheet of paper, in a slow oven. When very dry put the herbs in a mortar with one ounce of nutmeg and one ounce of cloves, one-half ounce of peppercorns, and one-fourth ounce of cayenne pepper; and pound all until very fine, then sift it through a fine hair-sieve. Put the spice into bottles, cork well, and keep them in a dry store-cupboard for use.
This is a house seasoning blend of the kind French kitchens kept on hand for forcemeats and pâtés, not a dish in itself. The measurements are by weight, and the proportions matter more than the total volume.
- What the weights come toThe whole batch is about 3¾ oz (roughly 105 g) of finished powder — something like ⅔ to ¾ cup once ground. Scale it down by half or a quarter unless you cook a lot of terrines; ground spice loses its edge within three or four months.
- "One-half ounce of thyme and bay-leaves"Read as half an ounce for the two together, matching the quarter ounce each given for marjoram and rosemary. Dried bay is very light, so half an ounce is a generous handful of leaves plus a good pile of thyme.
- The slow ovenA slow oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 250-300F, though the book gives no figure; either way that is hotter than you want for herbs — at that temperature the volatile oils go off before the leaves dry. Use the lowest setting your oven has, 170-200F, door propped, and pull the herbs when they crumble between the fingers, usually 20 to 40 minutes.
- Dryness is the hingeAny residual moisture in the herbs will cake the finished powder and turn it musty in the bottle. The leaves should snap, not bend, before they meet the spices.
- Mortar and hair-sieveA hair-sieve was a fine horsehair mesh; a fine-mesh kitchen strainer does the same job. A blade coffee grinder kept for spices will do the pounding in seconds, but grind the woody rosemary and the cloves first and the herbs last, then sift and re-grind the coarse tailings.
- Whole nutmeg and clovesBoth are given by weight in whole form — an ounce of nutmeg is roughly four whole nutmegs, an ounce of cloves something close to a third of a cup. Buying them pre-ground defeats the point of the blend, which exists because ground spice fades.
- Cayenne strengthA quarter ounce of modern cayenne may well be hotter than much of the ground red pepper sold when the book appeared, though that comparison is hard to pin down. Start with half that and adjust after you have tasted the blend in something.
- How to use itA quarter to a half teaspoon per pound of forcemeat, sausage, pâté or game stuffing is a reasonable working rate. Fry a small patty of the seasoned mixture and taste it before committing the whole batch.
- StorageSmall dark glass jars, filled to the top and tightly closed, kept away from the stove. Air space in a half-empty bottle is what stales the blend.
Oscar Tschirky's "French Spice" is the épices fines or spice parisienne of the professional French kitchen — a pre-mixed seasoning powder kept in the larder so that a cook charged out with fifty terrines did not have to weigh out seven spices for each one. It is a cousin of quatre épices, the simpler pepper-nutmeg-clove-ginger mix still sold in France, and the recipes vary from house to house; Escoffier and others published their own proportions, and the heavy hand with nutmeg and cloves here is characteristic of the era's charcuterie. Its presence in a Waldorf book is a reminder that Oscar's volume was written from and for a brigade kitchen: this is one of the standing preparations a hotel line depended on, alongside the stocks and the aspics, rather than a dish a diner would ever see named on a menu.