Nutmeg and Mace

Nutmeg, from Birds and all Nature, Chicago, 1899.

Nutmeg, Myristica fragrans, is the fruit of an evergreen tree native to the remote Banda Islands in the Maluku (Molucca) province of Indonesia. Nutmegs are ovoid shaped and around 2–3cm long; mace is the aril, a bright red fleshy covering of the nutmeg, and is itself used as a spice (Figures 20 and 23). The Moluccas were often known as the Spice Islands and the Banda Islands are a group of ten small volcanic islands about 140km south of Seram, which itself is very remote.

The first recorded use of nutmeg as a food is from an archaeological site on Pulau Ai (one of the Banda Islands), where it was found as residue on ceramic potsherds and is thought to be about 3,500 years old.¹ The nutmeg tree grows to around 65ft high and the fruits resemble apricots and are a similar size.

Nutmeg has a pungent fragrance and a slightly sweet taste – the ground-up nut is used as a spice to flavour various dishes: baked foods, puddings, confections, mulled wine, potatoes, meats, vegetables and sauces. In Indonesian cuisine it is used in spicy soups such as soto, sop kambing and bakso, in gravy for meat dishes and in popular sweets like fried bananas.

The Banda Islands were the only source of nutmeg until the late eighteenth century, but it appeared in Europe and the Middle East much earlier than that as a result of Arab traders, who jealously guarded its source. Nutmeg was well known in Europe by the sixth century CE. Spices became expensive in the Dark Ages and even in the fourteenth century, when spices were more readily available, a German price table of 1393 listed a pound of nutmeg as worth seven fat oxen.² In England, nutmeg was scarce in the medieval era, though mace was relatively popular based on occurrences in contemporary recipes – but more expensive. Remains of mace were found in the fifteenth-century drains of Paisley Abbey, Scotland; a nutmeg fragment has been found from the medieval hospital at Soutra, Scotland, from the late fifteenth century/early sixteenth century at Bratislava, Slovakia, and from early fourteenth-century Beroun in the Czech Republic.³ The Portuguese, Dutch and English fought for control of the enormously lucrative trade in Far Eastern spices from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, which will be described in the following section.

The nutmeg tree didn’t reach the New World until 1773.⁴ From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the French had wanted to transplant spice plants to their own territories, and in 1750 a price of 20,000 pieces of silver was offered to bring twenty-five nutmeg plants to the southern Indian port town of Pondicherry (which was under French control). After an unsuccessful attempt in the 1750s, the naturalist Pierre Poivre succeeded in bringing many nutmeg plants to Mauritius in 1770 and 1772. Specimens were sent on to Isle de Cayenne in French Guiana, arriving in 1773. The United States became involved in the spice trade around the end of the eighteenth century and ships sailed from Atlantic coast ports, trading American produce for spices (especially pepper), tea and coffee.

Nutmeg isn’t just a spice – it also has hallucinogenic properties, due to a psychoactive substance called myristicin. It was used by Albert Hoffman (predictably, he discovered LSD) and Malcolm X; however, the mild euphoria may be accompanied by nausea, headaches, hallucinations and paranoia, among other unpleasant side effects – so use modestly!