Nutmeg, that bottle of spice you toss into your basket at the supermarket along with the cloves, coriander and bergamot, has a rich and exotic history.
What it means to most us now is something cheap and cheery to tart up the rice pudding and eggnog, but just a cursory glance at how this humble accompaniment made its way to our dinner tables opens up an historical Pandora’s Box of skulduggery, greed and Imperial competition in the Caribbean. The history of nutmeg is a lesson in power politics and colonialism.
A quick word about the nutmeg plant itself first. It is to Grenada what the pig is to Germany. Every bit of it is used, nothing wasted. The plant grows up to 30 feet and the fruit’s 3 layers are the outer pericarp, used for jelly; a red membrane called mace, a twin spice; and the seed. Even the outer shell is used as garden mulch.
Nutmeg originates from the Far East, in the Banda Islands. In the Middle Ages its trade was managed by Arabs, who kept its location a secret. In 1511 the Portuguese got in on the act when they took control of Malacca, and stuffed several ships full of nutmeg on Banda, but it was their overlords the Spanish who first started exploiting the crop for the European market.
When the Dutch muscled their way onto the scene in 1621 they massacred or deported most of Banda’s inhabitants and took over what was by now a lucrative trade in nutmeg spice.
In Europe, especially England, it was worth its weight in gold as a reputed cure for the plague, and was already widely used in Asia as an aphrodisiac.
The Dutch tried desperately to protect their most valuable commodity by coating the seeds in lime before selling the fruit, to prevent propagation and competition.
Pigeons unintentionally thwarted this cunning plan when they spread the seeds to other islands in their droppings, and the Dutch put much effort into destroying these nutmeg diasporas to keep the price up. Even so, the wily French managed to smuggle germinating seeds onto Mauritius.
The history of nutmeg entered the final leg of its journey to modern supermarkets when British merchants in the West Indies in the early 1800s went to assist their colleagues in the East Indies with sugar extraction techniques, and in the quiet and polite British way pocketed a number of nutmeg seeds. These they planted in the gardens of estate plantations on Grenada and the crops prospered.
A final act of God on behalf of the British, in the form of a crop disaster that hit the Dutch Indonesian trade in 1850, put Grenada firmly on the map as the Spice Island of the Caribbean when its production of nutmeg was put into overdrive to fill the gap.
Grenada now produces almost a third of the globe’s nutmeg, and its importance to the island is so great that it has an honoured place on the flag.
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Thanks for the great info on nutmeg. Just curious about the jelly made from the nutmeg fruit. Do you know the ingredients?