Myristicaceae
Myristica fragrans
Nutmeg · Mace
- Part used
- seed
- Native range
- The Banda Islands of Indonesia
- Morphology
- An evergreen tree to fifteen metres bearing a fleshy fruit that splits to reveal a dark seed — the nutmeg — wrapped in a scarlet lacy aril, which is mace. Two spices from one seed.
What is in it
Evidence
No controlled evidence for medicinal use.
Safety
Nutmeg poisoning is real, well documented and unpleasant. Myristicin causes a delayed anticholinergic-like syndrome with agitation, hallucination, tachycardia, flushing and a sense of impending doom, lasting up to two days, after doses of roughly one to three whole nutmegs. Deaths are recorded, though rare. Culinary quantities are harmless.
Interactions: Additive with anticholinergic drugs
Regulatory: Permitted as a food. Not a permitted medicine ingredient at medicinal doses.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Restricted to the Banda Islands until the eighteenth century and traded at extraordinary value. Used medicinally for digestion across many traditions, and known as an intoxicant for centuries.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
The Banda Islands are the reason Manhattan is not Dutch. In the 1667 Treaty of Breda the English ceded Run, a nutmeg island roughly three kilometres long, in exchange for New Amsterdam. At the time the Dutch were widely thought to have got the better deal, because nutmeg was worth more than gold by weight and Run was one of the only places it grew.
The Dutch had secured the monopoly by killing or deporting almost the entire Bandanese population in 1621 — one of the more complete atrocities of the spice trade, committed for a plant now sold for a few dollars a jar.
Nutmeg poisoning is also genuine and periodically rediscovered by people who read that it is an intoxicant. It is: at a dose that produces a two-day anticholinergic delirium that almost everyone who tries it describes as thoroughly miserable.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.