Nutmeg

Nutmeg is the aromatic seed-kernel of Myristica fragrans, an evergreen tree native to the Banda Islands of the Moluccas in what is now Indonesia; the same seed yields a second spice, mace, from the scarlet lacy aril that wraps it. For centuries the Banda Islands were the world's only source, and control of them was fought over savagely: the Dutch East India Company seized a brutal monopoly in the seventeenth century, and by the Treaty of Breda the Dutch kept the nutmeg island of Run in exchange for ceding to England a far-off island called Manhattan. Few spices have so directly shaped the map.

Nutmeg's value made it, like cloves, part of the plague pomander tradition: during outbreaks such as London's Great Plague of 1665, nutmeg was carried in scented balls and pierced fruit in the belief that its strong aroma warded off disease, a folk practice belonging to the wider miasma theory of the period rather than to any real antiseptic property, given here as history and not as a claim about the spice's actual effect on infection. The Banda Islanders themselves were nearly wiped out in the Dutch conquest of the 1620s under Jan Pieterszoon Coen, one of the bleaker episodes of the spice trade, the human cost behind a spice now sold cheaply in any supermarket.

In European and American folk magic a whole nutmeg was carried as a lucky charm and a gambler's talisman, worn on a string or kept in the pocket for good fortune and to ward off ailments; grated nutmeg featured in charms for money and love. These uses are recorded here as folklore. A plain caution belongs with the spice: in the large amounts that folk practice sometimes urged, nutmeg is genuinely toxic, containing myristicin, and can cause serious poisoning, a fact stated here as warning, not as any encouragement to experiment. In ordinary culinary quantities it is simply a warm, sweet spice; its symbolism of luck and protection is drawn from its rarity and its comforting fragrance.

Cases of nutmeg poisoning recorded in modern medical literature are most often the result of people deliberately consuming large amounts in an attempt to feel its psychoactive effect, producing not any pleasant experience but a miserable, sometimes dangerous state of nausea, rapid heartbeat, hallucination and disorientation lasting a day or more, a documented pattern of misuse rather than any traditional or recommended practice, and stated here only as a further plain warning alongside the poisoning risk already noted. The spice's ordinary culinary use, a light grating over custard, eggnog or winter baking, involves a dose many hundreds of times smaller than any amount associated with poisoning, a distinction worth keeping clearly in mind.