Nutmeg: In the Name of Gold and Glory

Several years ago at my aunty backyard in Ciamis, West Java, I saw a tree abundantly and fully with yellow-green fruits, with hard flesh and good smell and sized of chicken egg. I ask my aunty, and she said that was "Pala" tree. Buah Pala or Pala Fruits, sold in West Java as "manisan" or candied fruits, or as whole dried seeds for spices. It came to my mind "Oh this is the tree that attracted colonialism in Indonesia for more than three hundred years.

Nutmeg plant is native to Indonesia's Banda Islands. Once one of the world's most valuable commodities, it drew the first European colonial powers to Indonesia. The tree is any of several species of trees in genus Myristica. The most important commercial species is Myristica fragrans, an evergreen tree indigenous to the Banda Islands in the Moluccas of Indonesia, or Spice Islands. The nutmeg tree is important for two spices derived from the fruit, nutmeg and mace.

Nutmeg

It is known to have been a prized and costly spice in European medieval cuisine as a flavouring, medicinal, and preservative agent. Saint Theodore the Studite (ca. 758 – ca. 826) allowed his monks to sprinkle nutmeg on their pease pudding when required to eat it. In Elizabethan times, it was believed nutmeg could ward off the plague, so nutmeg was very popular.

In some romantic story novels I found out that noble in medieval era used nutmeg powder as paste for tooth brushing.

The small Banda Islands were the world's only source of nutmeg and mace. Nutmeg was traded by Arabs during the Middle Ages and sold to the Venetians for very high prices, but the traders did not divulge the exact location of their source in the profitable Indian Ocean trade, and no European was able to deduce their location.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutmeg