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French Seasoning
(Another recipe.) Dry and pound together 1 1/2 ounces of thyme, 1 ounce of bayleaves, the same of sweet basil and summer savory, and also of sweet marjoram. Add a teaspoonful each of pepper and salt, 1 ounce of cloves, 1 nutmeg, and 1/2 ounce of mace, rubbed with the rind of a lemon and a clove of garlic. Dry in the oven, and strain and bottle for use.
A dry herb-and-spice blend of the type French kitchens kept bottled for stocks, forcemeats and braises. The quantities are by weight, which is what makes the proportions work.
- Weigh, do not scoopAll the herb amounts are ounces by weight, and dried herbs are extremely light: 1 1/2 oz of dried thyme leaf is roughly a cup, loosely packed. Measuring by volume will throw the ratios badly out.
- What the batch comes toSomething on the order of 7 to 8 ounces of finished powder — a large quantity by modern standards. Consider making a quarter batch; ground spice blends lose their volatiles within a few months.
- The lemon and garlic are the hingeRubbing the rind and the garlic clove into the spices introduces moisture, which is precisely what will spoil a stored blend. The oven drying is not optional, and the mixture must be bone dry and cool before it goes into a jar.
- Drying temperatureThe recipe says only to dry in the oven; use the lowest heat your oven will give, with the door propped, until nothing feels tacky. Higher heat will drive off the aromatics you just ground in.
- "Strain" means siftPush the pounded mixture through a fine sieve and re-pound whatever stays behind, particularly the bay stems and the mace blades. A spice grinder in short pulses does the same work; a mortar gives a better texture.
- Mace and nutmegMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold as blades or ground; 1/2 oz is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 tablespoons ground. If you buy whole nutmeg, one average nut grates to a little under a tablespoon.
- Salt and pepper are tokenA teaspoon each in seven-odd ounces of blend is seasoning for the mixture, not for the dish. Salt whatever you are cooking separately.
- Using itStart at about 1/4 teaspoon per pound of meat or per quart of stock. The clove is assertive at 1 ounce and will dominate if you are heavy-handed.
Blends of this kind — épices composées — were common in nineteenth-century French kitchens, where a single jar could stand in for a rack of separate spices when seasoning pâtés, forcemeats, terrines and braising liquors. They are generally taken to descend from the heavily spiced mixtures of medieval and early modern cookery, of which quatre épices (pepper, clove, nutmeg, ginger or cinnamon) is the best-known survivor, still sold in France for charcuterie. In this version the dried herbs — thyme, bay, basil, savory, marjoram — outbulk the spices roughly threefold. A recipe like this one is really a piece of kitchen infrastructure rather than a dish.