C hef Srinath Sambandan, formerly of The Park, Visakhapatnam, and now an independent restaurant consultant, was spoiling me rotten. He had brought me to the city’s Poorna Market, where fresh vegetables vie for space with fruits, fish, and spices. It was in Poorna Market that I caught a glimpse of mace at a spice stall, but this was no ordinary mace – it had been processed to resemble long strands of saffron. However, unlike saffron, this heap of mace was light, and you could literally see each strand. Mace is far from being the most popular spice in the country, so I was a trifle surprised at seeing it so lovingly and painstakingly processed. Chef Sambandan then told me that the combination of mace and star anise is vital to chicken curries and pulaos in coastal Andhra. The aroma of mace defines the dishes that make use of it. I didn’t know it at the time, but that is probably the most intensive use of mace by any community worldwide. Usually, it is used much more sparingly.
Nutmeg and mace are usually spoken of in the same breath, and quite legitimately too. After all, they come from the same tree. Mace is the red mesh that encloses the hard, nut-like ovoid seed that in turn encases the nutmeg. Native to five tiny islands called the Banda Islands in the Indonesian archipelago, 600 miles away from its nearest landmass, Australia, the story of these two spices is a tragicomedy in which the Arabs, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English and the Dutch all play their respective parts, and who are all finally outsmarted by French horticulturist and missionary Pierre Poivre – whose surname, somewhat ironically, means pepper, and who is sometimes identified as ‘Peter Piper’ of the well-known tongue twister, ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’.
As I’ve mentioned in the introduction to this section on aromatics, the history of these two spices is tied to the early expeditions of Portugal and Spain, and later the English and the Dutch, who all wanted to discover the source of these rare aromatics. At the time, the Banda Islands was the only part of the planet where nutmeg and mace grew. It should come as no surprise then that, the islands soon became a hotbed for international struggle, where first the Spanish and the Portuguese, and then the English and the Dutch slugged it out for trading rights. The Dutch won in the year 1599, and guarded their privilege so jealously that every last nutmeg that grew on ‘their’ islands was sterilized with lime before being exported, so that they would be incapable of reproducing. Consequently, they did maintain their monopoly over the nutmeg trade. (The Dutch, however, had not reckoned with the birds that flew over the islands, eating the fruit and dispersing the seeds, and not always on Dutch territory!)
The history of the Banda Islands is not a pleasant one. The Dutch massacred a large percentage of the native population, ruthlessly shook off Britain from occupying territory, and even traded the island of Manhattan for Run, the nutmeg-rich British stronghold in the Banda Islands, in order to consolidate their monopoly on the nutmeg trade. But before the Dutch retook control of the Banda Islands according to the Treaty of Breda that was signed in 1667, the British transported many nutmeg trees to other British colonies like Grenada, Sri Lanka and the West Indies.
The vicissitudes of history also played a part in dispersing nutmeg to other lands. In 1755, Pierre Poivre, an adventurer, sailed to the Banda Islands with the express intention of purloining a few nutmeg plants. It was a daring idea to be sure, because if he was caught, the punishment was certain death: Not only for him but for all those who helped him. However, Pierre Poivre actually managed to lay his hands on a couple of nutmeg plants and smuggled them to Mauritius, which was then a French colony.
In one of the twists of fate that makes the history of spice such a fascinating subject, the Banda Islands are shrouded in obscurity, while the image of a nutmeg makes its appearance on the flag of the island of Grenada, one of the largest exporters of nutmeg and mace today!
It is one of my greatest wishes to visit the Banda Islands, but in the meantime, I have devoured accounts by travel bloggers who have been luckier than I. Traces of the Dutch presence still, apparently, live on, in ruined hilltop forts, planters’ bungalows built in the signature Dutch style, with verandahs running on all four sides, and once-grand gateways, now falling to pieces slowly yet inexorably. The sea around the islands is myriad shades of blue, with coral reefs that draw in deep-sea diving enthusiasts. Each of the Banda Islands has a perfectly conical shaped volcano in the centre that towers over the 30-foot tall nutmeg trees that grow in its shade. From all accounts, any patch of flat land, including courtyards of unassuming private houses, is likely to have a series of mats on which shiny nutmeg seeds have been spread to slowly dry out in the sun. The rain that falls every single month of the year in the region serves two purposes: It keeps the spice gardens watered and serves as a dampener for all but the most determined visitors.
It is no surprise then that, after such evocative accounts of the Banda Islands, it was a great disappointment to see the nutmeg trees in the uplands of both Kerala, the only state in India where they grow, as well as Sri Lanka. To my dismay, there was no waft of fragrance: Early travellers, whether from Portugal, Spain or Netherlands, have all claimed to have been able to smell the plantations of Banda Islands from the sea even at a distance of 10 kilometres, much before their ships docked. Even the sheer height and girth of the nutmeg trees in Banda Islands isn’t even remotely echoed in South Asia, where a tree of a puny four-meter height is considered perfectly acceptable. Also, the dense plantations of hundreds of nutmeg trees are conspicuous by their absence in our neck of the woods.
What I did see on a plantation in central Kerala, not far from the elephant reserve of Thekkady, was a yellowish fruit whose pulp has to be discarded, inside which is the bright red mace. If you are imaginative enough, it will look like a many-fingered fist tightly enclosing the seed, inside which is the nutmeg. Even if imagination fails you, it still looks like a tightly furled protective covering for a dark brown shiny shell that encases the nutmeg seed. The best quality of mace is as bright a red and as fully formed as possible. When the fruit has just been split open, the mace is as shiny red as a sports car and turns dull with exposure to air. Broken bits of orange or dark yellow mace are near the bottom of the quality barrel. In the spice trade, the lowest grade is known as BWP: broken, wormy, punky. This grade can be used to distil oil, but certainly not to sell to unwary customers.
Crack a nutmeg in half vertically and you’ll see a pattern of light and dark striations, rather like worms, that are characteristic of betel nuts too. The dark streaks are the oil-bearing veins. Nutmeg that is past its sell-by date (and most spices, being agricultural products, are best used within one year of plucking) will not have striations because most of the oil has evaporated. The fruit that encases the two spices – nutmeg and mace – resembles a peach, and though it does not have a whit of sugar, it is used to make what is called ‘nutmeg jam’ in countries as far apart as the Banda Islands, Grenada and even Kerala. Not for any extraordinary gastronomic value, I must add, but rather like a subsidiary industry to make a bit of money on the side. The jam does have a faint echo of mace in it but unlike the immediate appeal of, say, strawberry jam, nutmeg-fruit jam, if it can be called that, is much more subtle and can only be appreciated by someone who is familiar with the context of the two spices and the fruit that binds them together in a tight embrace.
Out of all the aromatics, nutmeg is the one that has to be treated with the most care. Add too much pepper or too much cinnamon in a dish, and all that will happen is that the flavour of that spice will predominate, perhaps a tad unpleasantly. Use too much nutmeg, however, and the dish will become inedible, even hallucinogenic, depending on the volatile oil content. Take Kaveri G. Ahuja, for example, a passionate foodie from Coorg, who went on a driving holiday in Kerala and, tempted by the peach-like fruit that encloses both nutmeg and mace, took a large bite. It didn’t taste good at all, but she kept chewing on the pulpy fruit, hoping to get a whiff of either nutmeg or mace. Soon, she began to feel drowsy, and dropped off into a deep slumber that lasted several hours. That’s not unusual, because the volatile oil in both nutmeg and mace contains myristicin and elemicin, hallucinogenic and narcotic substances.
But it certainly has its uses. In Chef Sheikh Arif Ahmed’s extended family, every woman who goes into labour is given a betel leaf smeared with ghee and two generous pieces of nutmeg. The leaf is for digestion, the ghee helps it slide down the digestive tract quickly and the nutmeg heats up the body, so that the baby usually pops out in record time. Or so they believe. Arif, hailing from a prominent catering family in Hyderabad, says he has noticed that those family members who refuse this fiendishly tasteless concoction usually have to undergo caesarean sections!
This is not the first time I’ve heard the connection being made between nutmeg and body heat. In Zanzibar, one of the countries that produces nutmeg and mace, a whole nutmeg is often grated over porridge and consumed as an aphrodisiac or for its hallucinogenic properties. Closer home, Aligarh Muslim University did a series of studies to establish the aphrodisiac qualities of nutmeg – using rats in a series of controlled settings – which they then proved beyond doubt. Besides being an aphrodisiac, nutmeg is also hallucinogenic. The great food scientist K.T. Achaya, in his A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food , notes that the Chinese monk and traveller, Xuanzang was provided with 20 nutmegs daily during his stay at the Nalanda monastery in the 7th century. You can almost see Achaya pursing his lips!
Hyderabadi cuisine uses nutmeg and mace in a dessert called badamkand, made of almonds and flavoured with nutmeg, mace, green cardamom and saffron. In Lucknow, as a general rule, mace is used in combination with green cardamom, where the latter is used in double the quantity as compared to the former. Most of us would never use aromatic spices in a dal, but there is a Lucknowi arhar dal that contains nutmeg and mace along with green cardamom, curd and raisins. They are also used as a principal flavour in Salmani kebab, a minced lamb kebab with a hint of crushed sesame seeds. Any korma from Lucknow also has top-notes of nutmeg and fennel.
The doyen of all Lucknow chefs, Imtiaz Qureshi, says that it is tricky for a novice cook to get the perfect balance between nutmeg and mace, and the safest way to do so is in combination with cloves, cardamom and bay-leaves. His rule of thumb for using nutmeg and mace together is to use six times more nutmeg than mace. And coincidentally, nature bears him out perfectly: a whole nutmeg is exactly six times the weight of one ‘blade’ of mace. (Just why it is called a blade is a mystery I’ll never solve. To me it looks more like a flower, but recipe books, especially those written in the 1960s and earlier, never fail to refer to mace in terms of blades!)
One of the most unusual uses of mace I’ve come across is the vegetarian ‘settu’ soup of the Chettinad community, which has become the somewhat unlikely star of many of the communities’ weddings. It is on the repertoire of every caterer; in fact, ‘settu’ is the Tamil pronunciation of ‘set’ and refers to the whole set of dishes that a caterer does. Though it is a simple, clear tomato or cauliflower soup amidst a panoply of grand meat dishes, its light but distinctive spicing of fennel, turmeric, mace, clove, cinnamon, star anise and pepper has made it greatly sought after at weddings and other gatherings.
However, the most intensive use of this spice seems to be in the East and West Godavari districts of coastal Andhra Pradesh, a rich alluvial belt. There, every biryani and mutton or chicken korma, made by the enthusiastically meat-eating Naidu community, has a strong flavour of nutmeg, mace, cinnamon and cloves. Chef Sambandan calls it the signature flavour of the region. Travel to Telangana and the nutmeg and mace are replaced by cardamom; go further south to Rayalseema and seed spices with incendiary amounts of chillies dominate the flavours. So, coastal Andhra Pradesh ranks as the country’s top user of nutmeg and mace for a reason that nobody has quite been able to explain.
Worldwide, the trade makes a difference between the nutmeg and mace that comes from the Banda Islands (called East Indian in the spice trade) and those that come from Grenada (called West Indian). The former tend to be exported to India and Europe and the latter to the United States. Though nutmegs are graded into specific sizes (8 grams per nutmeg, 6 grams, and so on) the largest sizes are normally sold jumbled up together and are collectively called ABCD in the international trade. The less attractive but still excellent quality bears the less than felicitous name of ‘shrivels’ and merely indicates the outer appearance: the oil content is the same as the ABCD grade. Lower than this is the BWP grade which is fit for oil distillation, but not used in food.
Nutmeg from the West Indies (principally from Grenada) is lighter in colour than its Indonesian counterpart and has a lower volatile oil content. It is usually exported to the United States in a single grade called SUNS or sound unassorted nutmegs.
There are also a couple of ‘fake’ nutmegs that have neither the aroma nor the oil content. One grows wild in South India and is called Bombay nutmeg in the trade; the other grows in Papua New Guinea. Neither contain the precious volatile oil and are used to bulk up the weight in large orders by unscrupulous dealers.
Given how vast the Indian market is for spices, the nutmeg and mace section seems unnaturally modest: Only about a dozen or so large traders between Mumbai and Delhi, whereas the far more pricey saffron has double that number of significant dealers. Most of our nutmeg and mace come from Indonesia, but it is known as Singaporean in the trade, and in Kerala and Colombo as well. Historically, whole nutmegs have been the norm in the Indian market, but as convenience foods and short cuts are gaining ground in domestic kitchens, powdered Kerala and Sri Lankan nutmeg is now preferred. They are easier to grind than the far harder Indonesian nutmeg.
Nutmeg and mace both have a warm, soft, sweet, faintly cloying smell that reminds me, personally, of a children’s nursery. Internationally, both are used in milk-based puddings as well as in sauces that use milk. In this regard, the use of these two spices, whose flavour profiles are not unlike one another, resemble saffron, which is also used internationally in milk-based desserts and sauces. The only difference is that while nutmeg is also often grated on to cauliflower in the western world, saffron is almost never used to flavour vegetables. Other international uses for nutmeg and mace are in sausages and other processed meat products like luncheon meat, salami and meat pies, especially pork pies. In India and internationally, nutmeg and mace are also used in cakes and cookies, in golden latte (known to Indians as haldi doodh) and in eggnog. Specifically, in India and Pakistan, it is also a part of spice mixes that are used for biryani, kormas and even rogan josh.
Not surprisingly, both nutmeg and mace have identical components, albeit in different proportions: the myristicin, responsible for hallucinations in nutmeg, is present in minimal quantities in mace.
One of my more interesting brushes with nutmeg was in Istanbul, Turkey. I was happy to let my guide, Gulgun, do the ordering when we visited the restaurants. So when a rice pudding at a nameless eatery near the Grand Bazaar made its appearance on the table, I took little notice. Created from pounded rice cooked with milk and left to sit under a gentle heat till a pale golden crust formed on top, it seemed, at first glance, to be the same as the versions I had enjoyed a few times previously at other eat-and-run outlets in the area during the same trip. But as soon as I took a bite, the subtle flavour of nutmeg hit me and I was hooked. My short holiday in Istanbul became a race-to-the-finish search to eat as many bowls of rice pudding as I could to see if any other restaurant bettered the version I had already had. Sadly, none contained any nutmeg at all. One lesson I did learn, though, was that for nutmeg to shine through, the rest of the the ingredients in the dish have to be as simple as they possibly can.
Nutmeg is such an intrinsic part of my spice rack, that I got a shock when my parents-in-law visited me in Delhi for the first time. They wanted to know what the ‘round marbles’ were in my spice box. They loved the smell and the flavour, but would they use it themselves? No thanks. It was too foreign for them.
Nutmeg and mace are the wild cards of the spice world. They always grow together but have very different appearances yet very similar compounds. I always think of them like fraternal twins who have stayed in a tight embrace in the womb, are born together but who then live apart. Some use them in sausages, others in rice puddings and still others in spice blends to sprinkle over deeply savoury kormas with several layers of flavours. Some use only the nutmeg; others just the mace. And whatever they use, the twin spices blend right in and enrich their surroundings immeasurably.
ATUL SIKAND’S PANEER MAKHNI
Although there are several spices in this recipe, the dominant flavour is that of mace alone: All the others miraculously recede into the background. The main part of this dish is the gravy. The recipe is written following the steps of preparation and the ingredients are given separately for each step.
• 500 g paneer, cubed to desired size
Step 1
INGREDIENTS
• 800 g tomatoes
• 2 mace flowers
• 5 green cardamoms
• 1 cup water
METHOD
• Coarsely chop the tomatoes and place with water, mace and cardamom (barely broken open) in a large saucepan.
• Bring to a boil, then leave on low heat, covered, for about 15 minutes.
• When cool, carefully remove the tomatoes on to a plate with a slotted spoon.
• Peel and discard the shrivelled skins, removing as many as you can.
• Heat up the liquid used to boil the tomatoes. Bring to a boil with mace for another 10 minutes then discard the mace and cardamoms, retaining the water. Puree the tomatoes with the water.
Step 2
INGREDIENTS
• 1 tbsp ginger paste
• 1 tbsp garlic paste
• 1 medium sized onion, finely chopped
• 1-inch cinnamon stick
• ½ tsp carom seeds
• 100 g ghee/butter
• Heat the ghee or butter, add the cinnamon and fry till it turns brown. Then add the carom seeds.
• Add the onions and fry till they are translucent. Then add in the tomato puree prepared in Step 1. Cook covered on a very low flame till the gravy reduces to half: This will take about 30 minutes. You should be left with a semi-thick gravy.
Step 3
INGREDIENTS
• ½ tsp cumin powder
• 1 tsp coriander powder
• 1 tsp Kashmiri chillies
• 1 tbsp sugar
• ¼ tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp fenugreek powder
• Salt, to taste
• Lemon juice, to taste
• Coriander leaves, for garnish
• Green chillies, slit, to taste
METHOD
• Add the above ingredients to the gravy prepared in step 2.
• Cook for 1–2 minutes to blend all flavours. Then take the cubed paneer and fry in the gravy for 2–3 minutes.
• When well coated, stir in the cream, adjust flavours; you can add a bit of lemon juice.
• Garnish with green coriander and slit green chillies.
Note: When you add the cream, stir constantly and on low heat as the cream shouldn’t boil, just heat up slightly.
JENNY LINFORD’S BAKED RICE PUDDING
A few simple ingredients combine here to make a satisfying pudding, very much a comfort food. The little touch of grated nutmeg is essential to the dish, a tribute to the power of spices.
INGREDIENTS
• 600 ml full-fat milk
• A pinch of salt
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 3 tbsp short-grained rice
• Nutmeg, freshly grated
METHOD
• Preheat the oven to 150°C. Butter an ovenproof dish.
• Heat the milk to simmering point in a small pan. Remove from direct heat and stir in the salt, sugar and rice.
• Transfer the mixture to the buttered ovenproof dish and grate nutmeg over the top.
• Bake in the oven for 2–3 hours until the rice has softened and expanded and the milk has been largely absorbed.
• Serve warm from the oven.
CHEF RAVITEJ NATH’S NIZAMI JOUZI HALWA
Jouzi (the urdu word for nutmeg) halwa was one of the favourite desserts of the Nizam of Hyderabad. In fact, he liked it so much that the maker of this halwa was instructed to name his shop after the Nizam’s son, Hamid. Till today, the halwa is available only at Hameedi Confectioners in Hyderabad. The use of nutmeg balances the richness and sweetness of this halwa.
Chef Nath hails from Hyderabad, where he has been sampling jouzi halwa since his early childhood. To him, nutmeg is synonymous with this rich yet superb dessert that is fit for a king.
This recipe will make approximately 3 kilograms. Serves 30.
INGREDIENTS
• 5 l full-cream milk
• 500 g ghee
• 1 kg sugar
• 1 kg grated khoya
• 500 g whole wheat
• 4 tbsp mamra almond flakes
• 4 tbsp Afghani pistachio slivers
• 1 tsp nutmeg, freshly grated
• 6 silver varq leaves
METHOD
• Sprout the whole wheat for 72 hours and then grind to a paste.
• In a heavy-bottomed kadhai, bring the paste and milk to a boil and let it simmer for 2–3 minutes.
• Reduce to a low heat and cook, stirring continuously, for around 25–30 minutes until it turns thick.
• When thick, add khoya, and stir well, scraping the bottom continuously to prevent it from burning.
• Add all the ghee and mix till incorporated.
• Next add the sugar and cook for another 15 minutes, until the halwa leaves the sides of the pan.
• Add the freshly grated nutmeg powder, stir in half the almonds and pistachios.
• Remove to a container and garnish with varq, pistachios and almonds. Serve hot or warm.