Naughty But Spice

Nutmeg is the taste of Christmas, but it’s always had a wild side. Emma Hughes delves into its past

- Emma Hughes

AT my all-girls boarding school, we made our own fun—and by fun, I mean we attempted to fashion our own ‘recreational substances’. Every evening after dinner, we would painstakingly harvest the pith from bananas, which we then dried out behind the dormitory radiators—if you smoked the results, so the story went, it would give you a buzz. When this failed to materialise, we considered looting something rumoured to be even more powerful from the kitchen: nutmeg.

We wouldn’t have been breaking new ground—way back in the Middle Ages, people were whispering about the spice’s supposed mind-altering properties. It does contain a compound called myristicin, which is potentially psychoactive, but you’d need to ingest multiple tablespoons before noticing any effects and all you’d actually end up feeling is dizzy, confused and sick. Give it a swerve—it’s far more fun to cook with just a pinch of it and it really comes into its own at this time of year.