Spice Miscellany

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The Nutmeg Trail

By Eleanor Ford

Published 2022

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‘Nutmeg’ derives from the Latin for ‘musky nut’ and the tree it grows on, Myristica fragrans, means ‘mystical fragrance’.
Its Arabic name translates as ‘nut of goodness or deliciousness’. In early Sanskrit, nutmeg was referred to poetically as a ‘jasminescented seed’ and clove as the ‘divine flower of Lakshmi’, goddess of beauty and luxury.
Across much of Europe and Asia, cloves are named after nails as the dried flower buds resemble them in shape. Conversely, iron nails have been named for cloves in some languages of their native Indonesia.
An archaic name for mustard seed is ‘eye of newt’, popularly associated with witchcraft since being used in the witches’ brew in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Coriander comes from the Greek for ‘stink bug’ because of the similarity between the smell of bedbugs and the spice.
The phoenix makes its nest from cinnamon and cassia.
A sixth-century Arabic text tells of a mythical land ‘east of China’ that exported the fragrant treasures of musk, aloeswood and cinnamon.
Here gold was so abundant it was woven into clothing and leads for dogs.
Emperor Nero burnt a year’s supply of cinnamon at his wife’s funeral to atone for his role in her death.
Marc Antony was lured to Cleopatra’s palace by the heady aroma of burning cardamom pods. There, Cleopatra bathed in saffron.
Alexander the Great used saffron as shampoo.
Trimalchio, a first-century character in Satyricon, set to be the crassest tycoon in Rome, used saffron and cumin not only in food but scattered on the floor in a simulation of blonde sawdust.
Turmeric was used as yellow dye for the peplums of clothes worn during the Panathenaea, the most important religious feast of ancient Athens.
Princesses in eighth-century Javanese courts drank jamu made with turmeric and other spices to seek eternal youth.
The curcumin in turmeric and the piperine in black pepper have been shown to work together in tandem as antioxidants and anti-inflammatories.
In tropical forests, the pepper plant often grows in the shade of tea and coffee. In fact, there are types of tea with a distinct pepper flavour.
It was customary to bestow gifts of peppercorns at the great Roman midwinter festival of Saturnalia.
Black pepper is the stalwart of today’s Western dining table, but in the nineteenth century, ginger was a more common partner to salt.
Fashionable Europeans carried around their own personal nutmeg graters in the seventeenth century and ancient Greeks ground cumin over their plates.
Cumin is referenced in both the Old Testament (Isaiah 28:27) and the New Testament (Matthew 23:23) of the Bible.
Cumin is good for flatulence, according to Dioscorides.
Ancient Egyptians chewed on cardamom seeds to freshen their breath. The Han Dynasty in imperial China required courtiers to chew on cloves before addressing their Emperor.
Star anise is dominant in China’s soy-sauced and red-cooking methods. However, it is a relatively modern spice and doesn’t appear in early Chinese literature.
The boy emperor Jing Zong (824–827 AD) was served a chilled tonic called ‘clear wind rice’ made of milk, rice and camphor to cool him in the heat of the Chinese summer.
Japanese samurai ate chillies in ritual meals before battles to make them feel invincible.
Saffron was used in ancient potions, sprinkled between sheets and brewed into tea to make a man fall in love.
In medieval India, one could signal a secret infatuation by giving a bundle of cardamom, nutmeg and cloves wrapped in red thread and sealed with wax.
The Sanskrit text, the Kama Sutra, recommends the use of warming spices to enhance sexual performance in men: peppercorns, long pepper, ginger.
In Zanzibar, nutmeg is considered a female aphrodisiac. On their wedding mornings, brides grate it into their porridge.
Nutmeg is illegal in Saudi Arabia.
Consumed in large quantities, nutmeg is a hallucinogen.
Nutmeg necklaces were worn during the plague.
Unscrupulous spice traders in Connecticut are said to have whittled ‘nutmegs’ out of wood and it is known to this day as ‘The Nutmeg State’. A ‘wooden nutmeg’ became a metaphor for fraudulence in early America.
The first time Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe, he lost 5 ships and 250 men, but his voyage was deemed a success as he returned to Spain with 20,000kg of nutmeg.
Sixteenth-century nutmeg traders enjoyed a 60,000 per cent mark-up and London dockworkers were paid their bonuses in cloves.
In his Divine Comedy, Dante talks of cloves as a luxury used by frivolous squanderers from Siena for their millionaire roast meat.
In medieval Italy, confetti meant ‘candied spices, fruit or nuts’ like the colourful sugar almonds brought from the East by Venetian traders. During Lenten carnival, wealthy families would scatter these from their balconies into the eager throngs below.
When the Visigoths captured Rome, they demanded 3000 pounds of peppercorns as ransom. Contrary to received wisdom, spices were never used to conceal rotten meat. Rather, they were historically the most expensive ingredients in the kitchen, there to add opulence and layers of complexity – then as now.
Saffron is now the world’s most valuable spice as the stamens have to be harvested from violet-blue crocuses by hand. One hundred flowers are needed for only one gram of saffron and they must be picked at dawn to preserve the aroma.

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