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Savory Spice
Mix together equal parts of cloves, mace, nutmeg, pepper and salt, all finely ground beforehand. Put in a well corked bottle.
A four-spice blend cut with salt, of the kind kept on hand in professional kitchens for forcemeats, pâtés, sausage and potted meats. The recipe is barely more than a ratio, so the decisions left to you are proportion method, grind and quantity.
- Equal parts, by weightGround cloves, mace, nutmeg, pepper and salt have very different densities, so measuring by volume gives a different blend than measuring by weight. The recipe does not say which is meant; if you weigh, 1 oz (about 28 g) of each makes roughly 5 oz of finished spice, which is plenty for a home cook for a year.
- The salt is a fifth of the mixAt 20 percent salt this is a seasoning blend, not a pure spice. Season a forcemeat or pâté with it and reduce the salt you add separately, or you will oversalt.
- Mace is not nutmegMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed and tastes lighter and more floral. Both appear here deliberately, and substituting extra nutmeg for the mace flattens the blend. Blade mace ground fresh is far better than the pre-ground jar, which fades quickly.
- Grind fresh if you can"Finely ground beforehand" assumes a mortar or a spice mill. Cloves and pepper hold their oils well as whole spices and lose them fast once ground, so grinding to order and blending is worth the five minutes. A blade coffee grinder kept for spices works.
- Sift after mixingCloves and mace leave fibrous fragments that will not pass a fine grinder. Push the finished blend through a fine sieve so it disperses evenly into a farce rather than showing as dark specks.
- "Well corked bottle"A small screw-top jar filled nearly to the top, kept in a dark cupboard, does the same job. Air and light are the enemies here. Six months is about the useful life before the cloves dominate and everything else goes dull.
- How to use itStart at roughly 1 teaspoon per pound of meat in a pâté, terrine or sausage, and taste a fried test patty before committing the whole batch. It is also good in a meat pie filling or a potted ham.
Blends of this sort are the English and American descendants of the French épices composées or quatre épices — traditionally pepper, cloves, nutmeg and either ginger or cinnamon — which charcutiers used to season pâtés, terrines and sausages. This version keeps the pepper, cloves, nutmeg and mace and folds the salt directly into the jar. The presence of mace alongside nutmeg is characteristic of nineteenth-century American and British cookery, where the two were treated as distinct seasonings and both were stocked as a matter of course; mace has since largely dropped out of home kitchens.