How real are nutmeg's hallucinogenic properties? Here nutmeg fruit, freshly plucked from the tree, opens to reveal scarlet mace covering the nut's shiny brown shell. When dried, mace becomes pale orange.
“Stock up on nutmeg,” said Kathryn as she handed me a neatly folded clipping. “The price is about to go up.”
In “My Nutmeg Bender” (The Atlantic Monthly, January-February, 2012, p. 31), writer Wayne Curtis says that nutmeg is “enjoying something of a revival in the craft cocktail world.” But the spice’s affinity for punches and eggnogs may not be the only reason that savvy bartenders have added nutmeg graters to their arsenal of cocktail tools.
Curtis’s research into nutmeg revealed that it has a “psychoactive element called myristicin, whose chemical structure shares similarities with mescalin, amphetamine and ecstasy.” In other words, ingesting the spice is another way to get high.
This is not exactly a new discovery. As far back in the 12th century, a Benedictine abbess named Hildegard of Bingen wrote about nutmeg’s "mind-altering effects." (In Physica, she gave a recipe for spice cookies containing nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves and said that eating them often "will make your spirit happy.")
But really, how potent is nutmeg? To find out, Curtis ate 1-1/2 tablespoons of the grated spice....
Without a cocktail or egg nog to dilute the taste, he says that it had all the appeal of a spoonful of turpentine. Still he did experience “a giddy phase when everything seemed immensely amusing—including the shingles on my neighbor’s house….and a slight floating sensation when walking around the neighborhood.” But the main effect was “two days of feeling out of sorts” and some difficulty writing.
On second thought, maybe we're better off keeping nutmeg in kitchen cupboard. You might like to try recipes for Moroccan Coffee with Six Fragrant Spices and A Dutch Cake Fragrant with Nutmeg, Cinnamon and Clove, both right here on SpiceLines.
Like everything else, spices are getting more expensive. In “McCormick Spices Up Its Product Line for Home Cooks” (The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2012, p. B6), CEO Alan Wilson reveals that the cost of pepper “has basically quadrupled in four years and doubled in the last eighteen months. Cinnamon is up about 30%.”
There are multiple reasons for these increases, including “a lot of weather events” in the equatorial regions where most spices are grown, as well as political unrest in the Middle East. “We source a number of herbs in Egypt,” said Wilson, “and as that country became more uncertain, we immediately…shifted some of our sourcing to other parts of the Mediterranean.” Vietnamese pepper and cinnamon farmers are also shifting to even more profitable crops such as cocoa, further driving up spice prices.
