Mace
The Crimson Aril Around Nutmeg
Mace looks a little improbable before it's dried. Split open a ripe nutmeg fruit and the dark seed at its centre is wrapped in branching strips of brilliant red. They look almost as though they've been laid over the seed deliberately.
That red covering is the aril of Myristica fragrans. Peel it away, flatten it and leave it to dry and the transformation is considerable. Scarlet becomes orange, then golden brown, while the soft tissue turns thin and brittle. The finished pieces are known as blades of mace.
Nutmeg is waiting immediately underneath. Two spices, quite different in a jar, have been touching since the fruit developed.
Classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Family: Myristicaceae
Genus: Myristica
Species: Myristica fragrans
Common Names: Nutmeg Tree, True Nutmeg
Plant Part: Aril surrounding the seed
Spice: Mace
Native Range: Maluku Islands, Indonesia
Two Spices in One Fruit
Myristica fragrans is an evergreen tropical tree native to Indonesia's Maluku Islands, historically known as the Spice Islands. In warm, humid conditions it can reach around 10 to 20 metres tall, carrying glossy dark green leaves and relatively inconspicuous pale flowers.
The species is usually dioecious, with male and female flowers occurring on separate trees. Pollinated female trees produce yellowish, roughly oval fruits that split naturally as they ripen.
That's when the interesting part becomes visible.
The outer flesh opens to reveal the seed and its startling red covering. The aril becomes mace. Beneath it sits a hard seed coat surrounding the kernel that eventually becomes nutmeg. Harvesting the fruit means encountering both at once.
Scarlet Doesn't Last Long
An aril is a specialised structure associated with a seed. Mace doesn't form a complete skin around the nutmeg. Instead it branches across its surface, leaving the dark seed coat visible through the gaps.
Fresh from the fruit, those branches are soft, flexible and intensely red. They're carefully removed from the seed, often flattened, and dried. As moisture disappears, so does much of the scarlet colour. The aril moves through orange towards yellow and golden brown while becoming crisp enough to break between the fingers.
Whole dried pieces are called blades, which sounds rather grand for something so delicate. Their branching shape is still recognisable after drying, though. Even a fragment can give some clue to the way it once curved around the seed.
The nutmeg underneath goes through its own drying and processing before the familiar kernel is finally removed from its hard outer shell.
Related, But Not the Same
Mace and nutmeg share much of their warm aromatic character, which isn't surprising considering how closely they develop. Smell them side by side and the relationship is obvious. The difference is harder to reduce to a single word.
Mace is often described as lighter or more delicate, sometimes with a slightly sharper character. Nutmeg tends to feel rounder and heavier. That distinction becomes easier to recognise through the actual spices than through increasingly elaborate attempts to describe them.
Both contain aromatic compounds in their volatile oils, including myristicin, sabinene and pinene. Drying, storage and growing conditions all influence the finished aroma. Whole blades also retain their aromatic character better than ground mace because much less surface is exposed to air.
They belong together. They aren't interchangeable.
A Tiny Group of Very Important Islands
For much of its history, true nutmeg had an extraordinarily restricted natural range. Myristica fragrans originated in the Banda Islands within the wider Maluku archipelago, and for centuries these small islands were the source of the world's nutmeg and mace.
Long before Europeans reached them, the spices were already moving through established Asian trade networks. Each stage carried them further from the trees that produced them, and by the time they reached distant markets they could command considerable prices.
European attempts to control that trade became brutal.
During the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company pursued monopoly control over nutmeg production in the Banda Islands. In 1621, Dutch forces under Jan Pieterszoon Coen carried out a violent campaign against the Bandanese population involving killings, enslavement and forced displacement. Dutch controlled plantations followed, relying heavily on enslaved labour.
It's an uncomfortable history sitting behind two spices now found rather casually in kitchen cupboards.
The monopoly didn't last forever. Nutmeg trees were eventually established elsewhere in the tropics, and M. fragrans is now cultivated far beyond its original island home.
A Blade in the Pot
Mace travelled well because it was useful once it arrived. It found places in both sweet and savoury cooking, from baked foods and spice mixtures to sauces, meat dishes, pickles and preserved foods.
Whole blades can be added to a liquid while it cooks and removed afterwards. Ground mace disperses more easily but loses its aroma faster once exposed to air.
Nutmeg can sometimes stand in for mace and vice versa, but the result isn't identical. Keeping both makes that particularly apparent. They're related flavours rather than duplicates, produced by neighbouring tissues of the same fruit.
There isn't much mace on each one, either. A fruit produces an entire nutmeg seed but only the branching aril wrapped around it, helping explain why mace could be especially valuable in trade.
More Than a Kitchen Spice
Mace and nutmeg also travelled through systems of traditional medicine. Preparations containing them appeared in several regions where the plant was grown or traded, including historical European herbals and pharmacopoeias.
Their aromatic character made them attractive ingredients, particularly in preparations associated with digestion and fragrance. Historical use, however, isn't the same thing as evidence that those preparations were effective.
Familiarity in the spice cupboard can also make nutmeg and mace seem more harmless than they necessarily are. Both contain compounds capable of causing unpleasant and potentially serious effects in excessive quantities. Ordinary culinary use involves much smaller amounts.
A spice can be perfectly ordinary at dinner and still deserve some respect as a botanical material.
Keeping the Blades Intact
Dried mace doesn't ask for complicated storage, but it does benefit from being left alone. The blades are thin and brittle, and heavier botanicals can crush their branching structure surprisingly easily.
A sealed container somewhere cool, dry and away from direct sunlight helps preserve the volatile compounds responsible for its aroma. Whole blades generally hold that character longer than ground mace.
The brilliant red of the fresh aril won't return. Golden orange and brown are what remain after drying, along with the shape.
That shape is worth protecting.
In the Apotheca
Mace becomes considerably stranger once whole nutmeg is sitting beside it.
One is a hard brown seed kernel. The other is a brittle branching blade, orange and light enough to look almost unrelated. Put the fruit back around them in your mind and suddenly they fit together. Mace once curved over the seed closely enough to follow its shape.
That's the detail a jar of ground spice completely loses.
The colour changes, the soft tissue dries and the two parts are separated at harvest, but a whole blade still carries the outline of where it began. Nutmeg was immediately underneath it all along.
Leave a comment