By Joel Denker
The location of the Spice Islands was cloaked in mystery. The Isles’ “spicie drugs,” as the poet John Milton called them, were even more enticing to their devotees because of their murky origin. The traders of the Orient, who knew where to find them, kept their source a secret.
The islands, it was said, were an Edenic paradise on the edge of the world. But there were also fears that treacherous seas and beastly inhabitants awaited intruders.
The quest for the luxurious aromatics led the European powers to fight savage wars and to spill human treasure. Profitable possessions, the coveted prizes were simultaneously flavorings, medicines, and perfumes.
One object of their frenzied search was a yellowish-orange fruit resembling an apricot, which hung from the spreading branches of a tropical evergreen. Underneath the fleshy, outer skin of the fruit was a red, lacy membrane that enclosed a dark brown shell. This covering, known as mace, was a spice in its own right. Ludovico di Vartherna, one of the first Europeans to see the fruit, described it with a floral image: “Before the nut arrives at perfection, the mace stands around (it) like an open rose, and when the nut is ripe the mace clasps it.”
When the shell was dried, the nutmeg (actually a seed) rattled inside. It got its name from a Latin phrase meaning musky, or aromatic, nut. The botanical term for the spice, myrstica fragrans, translates as “smelling of myrrh.” The fruit, then, of the nutmeg tree contains two spicy treasures. It is truly, as food writer Elisabeth Ortiz observes, “one of nature’s great packaging jobs.”
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To learn more about nutmeg, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
