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Kitchen Spice
Mix together two pounds of ground black pepper, one pound of ground ginger, four ounces each of ground allspice, nutmegs and cinnamon, one-half ounce of ground cloves and three pounds of salt. This is very nice for seasoning sauces, soups and gravies, and should be preserved in a tightly-corked bottle.
A hotel-scale seasoning salt, written for a kitchen that went through it by the pound. The proportions are what matter; the quantities are not.
- The batch is enormousAs written this makes about 6¾ lb of mixed seasoning. Divide by 16 for a domestic jar: about 57 g ground black pepper, 28 g ground ginger, 7 g each of allspice, nutmeg and cinnamon, a scant 1 g of cloves, and 85 g of salt.
- It is mostly saltSalt is roughly 44 percent of the mix by weight, so this is a seasoning salt rather than a spice blend. Season with it in place of salt, not in addition to it, or dishes will come out flatly over-salted.
- Pepper leads, cloves whisperBlack pepper is twice the weight of the ginger and about two and a half times the combined warm spices. The half ounce of cloves against two pounds of pepper keeps the cloves in the background; they dominate anything they are given room in.
- "Nutmegs" means ground nutmegHere nutmeg is called for by weight, ground, rather than counted as whole seeds. Four ounces is roughly 20 whole nutmegs, which is worth knowing if you grate your own.
- Ground spice does not keepA tightly-corked bottle was the best available in 1896, but pre-ground pepper and nutmeg lose their volatiles in weeks, not years. Mix small amounts often and store in a sealed jar away from the stove; a batch this size in a home kitchen would be stale long before it was used.
- Where it goesIntended for sauces, soups and gravies, where the sweet spices read as depth rather than as spice. It is less at home in fresh or acidic preparations, and the cinnamon and cloves will announce themselves in anything pale or delicate.
Pre-mixed "kitchen spice" was standard equipment in the professional French-trained kitchens of the period, and this is often likened to the épices composées or spice parisienne of the classical brigade — a close relative of the four-spice quatre épices still sold in France, which likewise leans on pepper with ginger, nutmeg and cloves. The point was consistency: a single jar of standardised seasoning meant a kitchen's seasoning did not vary with whoever happened to be at the stove. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, was credited with the 1896 book in which the recipe appears.