Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class A History of Nutmeg About this episode Nutmeg is native to the Banda Islands in Indonesia. Once Europeans discovered nutmeg, they had an enormous - often violent - impact on the islands it was growing on.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Deanna Flores is a flag football star, a trailblazer, an entrepreneur, and now host of a new podcast.
0:10 Holly Frey? In Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture to find the whole person behind the public identity.
0:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, you'll get to know Deanna, her guests, and even yourself a little better. No lectures, no know-it-all hosts, just real people being real.
0:26 Holly Frey? Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores, out now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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2:45 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:59 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
3:01 Tracy V. Wilson? I really can't speak for anywhere else, but here in the United States, it can feel like there's just a whole lot of nutmeg around from roughly October into maybe early January. Nutmeg is in the spice blend, known as pumpkin spice, along with usually cinnamon and cloves. That does not taste anything like pumpkin, and it's not supposed to mimic pumpkin flavor. Those are the spices that are usually used to flavor pumpkin pies. It would be incredibly hard to miss the fact that nowadays, in the fall here, there is just pumpkin spice blend in seemingly everything everywhere. Then, as we get more toward winter,
3:45 Tracy V. Wilson? nutmeg goes into mulled ciders and mulled wines and eggnog, which is a personal favorite of mine in my family. Sugar cookies are a Christmas tradition, and the family sugar cookie recipe is flavored with vanilla and nutmeg. Obviously, that's not everything nutmeg goes into, not even just in the United States, but it's December. So that's where my mind is right now.
4:12 Holly Frey? Behind the scenes, we're going to talk about nutmeg is year round.
4:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Of course, nutmeg is not native to the United States. It is native to the Banda Islands in Indonesia. The Banda Islands are part of the Maluku archipelago. That's also home to other spices, including cloves. So this region has also been called the Spice Islands. People living on these islands traded spice with Asia and with other parts of the Pacific for centuries before Europeans even knew where they were, or frankly, what nutmeg was. But once Europeans found that out, they had an enormous impact on nutmeg and on the islands that they were growing on and the people living there. That means some of the history we are going to be talking about today involves a lot of violence and genocide.
5:02 Holly Frey? The word nutmeg is used to describe a number of fruits and seeds from all around the world. What we're talking about today comes from the Maristica fragrans tree. It's an evergreen tree with broad glossy leaves, which can grow to between nine and 12 meters or 30 and 40 feet in height. This tree requires shade, especially when it's young, so it usually grows alongside larger trees. Nutmeg trees normally bear fruit for the first time when they're around seven years old, and it's only around that time that you can tell whether it's a male or female tree. And the female trees are the ones that produce fruit.
5:43 Holly Frey? At the peak of productivity, one of these trees can produce as many as 20,000 fruit in a season, and they can produce fruit for 60 years or more. They can even live for more than a century.
5:56 Tracy V. Wilson? The fruit of this tree is a droop, meaning a fleshy fruit that usually has one single seed in the middle, like a peach or an olive. The outer flesh of this droop is pale yellow, and it is edible. People eat it in the areas where it grows, including by making it into jams. When the fruit fully matures, the outer fleshy part splits open, and that reveals a shiny brown seed in the middle. This seed is surrounded by an aril, which is a softer and, in this case, bright red layer. The aril of this particular seed is not a solid covering. It looks almost like somebody haphazardly painted the seed from one end to the other in a thick red nail polish,
6:40 Tracy V. Wilson? leaving some overlaps and some gaps.
6:43 Holly Frey? This is the source of two spices, nutmeg from the seed and mace from the aril. They have a similar flavor, which is warm and earthy and a little bit nutty, but mace tends to be both lighter and peppier. Turning these into spices involves removing the aril from the seed and then drying the two parts separately in the sun. This process takes just a few hours for mace, but drying and curing the nutmeg takes six to eight weeks.
7:13 Tracy V. Wilson? The nutmeg spice doesn't come from the whole seed, but from smaller kernels that are inside of it. Once the seed is fully dry, you can shake it and those rattle around in there. Typically, these kernels are removed by tapping one end of the seed covering to break it open. Sometimes that's done by hand and sometimes with a machine. You can purchase both nutmeg and mace, either ground or whole. Whole nutmeg looks like a little dried nut, while mace blades, which is what the whole form is called, that looks more like little dried fruit strips.
7:49 Holly Frey? According to a 2018 paper published in the journal Asian Perspectives that examined residues on pottery fragments, the earliest known use of nutmeg in food dates back 3,500 years. Nutmeg was also one of the first spices to be traded from these islands. The Bandanese traded nutmeg to other parts of Southeast Asia as long ago as 2,000 BCE and later to South and Southwest Asia.
8:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Over the centuries that followed, traders carried the spice to other parts of the world, including Eastern Africa. It had probably made its way to the Roman Empire by about 2,000 years ago. Pliny the Elder described a tree whose fruit has two flavors. That sounds like it could be nutmeg. By the 6th century, nutmeg had been introduced into what's now Istanbul, and by the Middle Ages, it had made its way to Western Europe.
8:43 Holly Frey? For centuries, virtually all of the nutmeg that arrived in Western Europe got there via Arab traders through the port of Venice. And for a long time, Europeans didn't know exactly where this spice was coming from. Its origin was a closely guarded secret. It's possible that nutmeg was carried from Indonesia to Polynesia to the Americas before Columbus made his first voyage in the 15th century. But the largest source of nutmeg was more likely to have been European colonists later on.
9:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Throughout its history, nutmeg has been used to make incense and fragrances. The earliest references to medicinal uses for nutmeg are in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas, which date back to about 1500 BCE on the Indian subcontinent. Chinese medical texts from the 8th century describe using nutmeg to treat diarrhea. Persian mathematician and physician Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, described a similar use for nutmeg in his Canon of Medicine in 1025. In various parts of the world, nutmeg has also been used to treat and prevent flatulence. And in more recent years, there have been controlled
9:57 Tracy V. Wilson? trials into whether it's effective against a range of conditions, including diabetic neuropathy, depression, and digestive issues, including nausea and vomiting.
10:08 Holly Frey? Essential oils can be extracted from nutmeg and mace through pressing or steam distillation, which produces nutmeg butter or oil of mace. In addition to being used in condiments and fragrances, these are also used medicinally. Nutmeg butter in particular has also been used to make pain relieving topical creams to treat conditions like arthritis.
10:31 Tracy V. Wilson? And there are some other uses for nutmeg as well. One of nutmeg's many compounds is called maristacin, and it has a number of properties, including being insecticidal. That might be why 12th century Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI had the streets of Rome fumigated with it before his coronation. The Tale of Seratopas from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which was written at the end of the 14th century, also includes a description of riding through a fair forest full of wild beasts and herbs, large and small, with one of those herbs being, quote,
11:10 Tracy V. Wilson? "not mudged to put in ale, whether it be moist or stale, or for to lay in a coffer." A coffer is a cabinet or a trunk where a person would store their clothes, so it's possible that laying nutmeg in the coffer was about keeping the moths or the fleas or other pests away.
11:29 Holly Frey? And of course, nutmeg has been used to flavor a wide range of sweet and savory foods all over the world. It's one of the flavorings in bechamel sauce, which is one of the mother sauces in French cuisine. It's also part of a lot of spice blends, including mulling spices in various parts of Europe, jerk seasonings in Jamaica, catre à piece in France, speculus creuden in the Netherlands, mixed spice in the UK, ras al hanout in northern Africa, and of course, pumpkin spice here in the US. Pumpkin spice might seem like a recent invention based on its increasing ubiquity in the autumn over the last couple of decades, but McCormick's first pumpkin spice blend,
12:12 Holly Frey? containing cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice, launched 90 years ago in 1934. Also, we know people have extremely strong feelings about their spice blends, so if in your opinion, nutmeg does not belong in one of those that we just mentioned, absolutely don't use it in there, or don't purchase the pre-made ones that include it.
12:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Historical medical literature also includes numerous accounts of nutmeg poisoning. Nutmeg butter contains high concentrations of various substances that can be toxic, but the spice can also be toxic if it's ingested in large amounts. Overwhelmingly, these reports have not been from somebody just overdoing it with the nutmeg in their cooking, though. Some of the compounds in nutmeg can be intoxicants or hallucinogens, and so there are cases of people poisoning themselves while intentionally ingesting it for that reason. But most of the reports in historical medical literature have described someone who was attempting to terminate a pregnancy.
13:18 Tracy V. Wilson? And nearly all of those reports, those attempts, were not successful, but the person did become very ill. In more recent years, there have also been viral nutmeg challenges on social media, leading to calls to poison control or even hospitalizations. Please do not eat giant tablespoonsful of nutmeg.
13:41 Holly Frey? The risks of ingesting large amounts of nutmeg have been known for a very long time. There was a saying at the Salerno School of Medicine, which was founded in Salerno, Italy in the 10th century, that, quote, "One nut is good for you, the second will do you harm, the third will kill you." To be clear, though, there is only one known fatality from ingesting nutmeg, which was in an eight-year-old who ate two whole nutmegs. There is no antidote for nutmeg poisoning, though. People are just given supportive care as they recover, so once again, don't be chugging down tons of nutmeg.
14:18 Tracy V. Wilson? No. Today, the vast majority of nutmeg being produced is used as a flavoring in processed foods like sausages. Globally, about 12,000 tons of nutmeg are produced annually and about 2,000 tons of mace. That sounds like a lot, especially when you're considering how much does come in like a little nutmeg jar for your house. But that's only about 10% of how much pepper is produced every year and pepper production is less than 20% of chili production. After a quick sponsor break, we're going to talk more about the Banda Islands and what happened there after Europeans learned that they were the home of nutmeg.
15:03 Speaker 03 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
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16:29 Holly Frey? She's talking to an athlete on the field, a founder heading into a pitch, or a musician before a show. The conversation starts with the official bio ends.
16:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, Deanna shares her own experiences, questions, and even doubts. Her guests learn from her, she learns from them, and you might pick up something along the way. No lectures, no know-it-all host, just real people being real.
16:50 Holly Frey? Come curious and leave with something you can use.
16:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores, out now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico.
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18:14 Speaker 06 Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of the Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Seitz proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
18:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jessa have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
19:27 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
19:47 Tracy V. Wilson? By the Middle Ages, nutmeg had become a big part of Western European cuisine. As we said earlier, most of it was being brought to Venice by Arab traders and then going on to the rest of Europe from there. In the late Middle Ages to the early modern era, nutmeg was so popular in Europe that people carried their own pocket graters and receptacles for the ground nutmeg so that they could grate fresh nutmeg onto their food there at the table. For wealthy people, these were usually made of silver, and silversmiths used nutmeg vessels to really demonstrate their skills. Sometimes the container and the grater were all one device
20:28 Tracy V. Wilson? that was cleverly shaped like some kind of seed or something else entirely. Less wealthy people typically still had these if they had enough money to afford nutmeg, but it would be something more like a tin grater and a wooden box.
20:43 Holly Frey? The 17th century cookbook, The Accomplished Cook by Robert May demonstrates how popular nutmeg was in England in the early modern period and how extensively it was being used in food. This cookbook is about 520 pages long and it contains 608 mentions of nutmeg and 569 mentions of mace. And it's not just in one kind of food. The recipes are arranged in 24 sections like boiled meats, roast meats, puddings, creams, pies and tarts, fish and salads. That's salads just spelled differently. The only sections that don't seem to contain
21:23 Holly Frey? any nutmeg are the section on salads and the last section, which is about what to feed poultry.
21:29 Tracy V. Wilson? It's possible that there's a nutmeg mention in the salads that I missed that's maybe spelled weirdly because there are a couple of spelling variations in these, in this book, but like basically every kind of food had nutmeg in it. It's not entirely clear when and how Europeans learned exactly where nutmeg came from. A couple of the sources that were used in this episode specifically mentioned geographer Zakaria Al-Kazwini, who was born in what's now Iran, and they claim that he disclosed what had been a secret. Uh, I'm honestly not sure what he might've said about nutmeg in his writing because I did not have access to those texts, but he did describe cinnamon as coming from a place
22:14 Tracy V. Wilson? called Sarandib, which was Sri Lanka. He did that about 1275. Ibn Battuta, who we've covered on the show before, also described Sri Lanka as the home to cinnamon in 1340. So cinnamon is not nutmeg. Sri Lanka is off the eastern coast of India. It is far to the west of the Vanda Islands, but it's very clear that sources like these translated into Latin were one of the ways Europeans learned about where various spices came from.
22:44 Tracy V. Wilson? It's really likely that sources like these and other translations of Arabic works with ongoing patterns of trade and the accounts of European explorers and cartographers and other travelers, that all this combined to give Europeans a general idea of where the spice islands were by the 15th and 16th centuries.
23:05 Holly Frey? With that knowledge, various European powers started trying to capture parts of South and Southeast Asia, not just for nutmeg, but for the other spices and trade goods that were coming out of the region as well. In 1511, a force led by Afonso de Albaque of Portugal captured Malacca in what's now Malaysia, which was a key trading hub for the Indonesian archipelago. This made it possible for the Portuguese to start buying nutmeg directly from the Banda Islands rather than going through Arab traders.
23:38 Tracy V. Wilson? At that point, the Portuguese didn't really have the military or naval strength to start trying to conquer the islands themselves, but the Dutch and the English did. The Dutch invaded the Banda Islands in 1599 and established the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, two years later. In 1616, the English took control of the island of Run, which is part of this archipelago. They were basically just trying to keep it out of the hands of the Dutch, and then the English established the English East India Company. The English and the Dutch fought over territory in these islands, including the Dutch laying
24:19 Tracy V. Wilson? siege to Run and ultimately occupying it in 1621.
24:25 Holly Frey? The VOC aggressively worked to limit nutmeg production only to the islands that it controlled and to establish a monopoly on the nutmeg trade. This meant destroying nutmeg trees on islands it did not control and trying to force the Bandanese to stop trading their own nutmeg with any of their existing trading partners.
24:47 Tracy V. Wilson? There was no central Banda Nees authority for the Dutch or any other European power to try to treat with. There were various elders and families that had become wealthy as traders on each of these islands, but even from one island to another, there was no one primary authority figure. Broadly speaking, though, the Banda Nees refused to accept Dutch claims over the islands, and the idea of a trading monopoly was just completely foreign to them. They aggressively fought back, and the Dutch decided the best course of action would be to clear the islands of as many of them as possible.
25:27 Holly Frey? At first, the Dutch tried to get the Banda Nees to leave, including trying to convince them to surrender their weapons, destroy their own villages, and allow the Dutch to deport them to somewhere else. When that didn't work, Governor General Jan Pietersen Koon met with his council to formulate a new plan, and they unanimously agreed to burn down the Banda Nees villages and destroy all of their boats themselves, so that the Banda Nees would have no choice but to go where the Dutch took them.
25:57 Tracy V. Wilson? During this sweep of destruction, the Dutch captured and enslaved some of the Banda Nees, but they massacred many more. It's estimated that there were 13,000 to 15,000 people living in the Banda Islands before the Dutch conquest and genocide, and then only about 1,000 afterward. This took place over just a couple of months in 1621, but surviving Banda Nees who had fled to the mountains or to other nearby archipelagos continued to fight against the Dutch for years.
26:32 Holly Frey? The people of the Banda Islands had been nurturing and harvesting from nutmeg trees for thousands of years. The trees were one part of the land that they lived with, interconnected with everything else on the islands that they shared. But the Dutch East India Company moved to a system of large cultivated nutmeg estates, including attempting to uproot young nutmeg trees out of their forests to transplant them to these plantations. But the Bandanese were the only people who actually knew how to grow and process nutmeg. So the Dutch intentionally divided up the remaining Bandanese population, including separating families, to make sure there was at least one person with the necessary
27:16 Holly Frey? knowledge at each of the plantations. The resulting practices for cultivating these trees became a hybrid of indigenous knowledge and imported European methods.
27:28 Tracy V. Wilson? The Dutch also enslaved people from other islands to work on the plantations. About 13% of the enslaved population in the Banda Islands was Bandanese, and then the rest were from somewhere else, usually in Southeast Asia, places that the VOC had claimed other territory. This had a similar impact to the transatlantic slave trade in Africa, including influencing the escalation of warfare among different peoples as the Dutch then enslaved their prisoners of war. In addition to the enslaved people who were working on nutmeg plantations, Dutch officials also enslaved people in their households. They were also
28:10 Tracy V. Wilson? known for forcing the people who they saw as the best workers to serve on their trading ships.
28:16 Holly Frey? The Dutch East India Company's efforts to keep the Banda Islands and its nutmeg monopoly wasn't just a military effort. They also distributed inaccurate maps to try to keep other European powers from knowing exactly where the islands were. And once they had a monopoly, they artificially controlled the price of nutmeg, including by burning down warehouses full of it when there was an oversupply.
28:44 Tracy V. Wilson? The Dutch monopoly on nutmeg lasted for more than a century. In 1667, the Dutch Republic solidified its hold on these islands through the Treaty of Bretta, which ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War. This treaty formalized Dutch control of the island of Run in exchange for English control of the island of Manhattan, which is why sometimes people say the Dutch traded Manhattan for nutmeg.
29:12 Holly Frey? But in 1769, French horticulturalist Pierre Poivre, who is possibly the namesake of the nursery rhyme character Peter Piper, smuggled 32 nutmeg seedlings from the Banda Islands to the French colony of Mauritius. This was actually his second attempt. On his first try, only two of the seedlings survived. By 1773, nutmeg trees were also being introduced to other French colonies that seemed like they might have the right climate for them.
29:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Later, during the French Revolutionary Wars, the Dutch Republic became the Batavian Republic, and then that came under control of the French Empire. So during the Napoleonic Wars, the British invaded the Banda Islands, now considered part of the general French territory. That was a campaign that took about seven months. And then after taking control of the islands, the British started introducing nutmeg trees to their colonies in the Caribbean as well. English planter Frank Gurney introduced nutmeg trees to Grenada in 1843 with the first commercial nutmeg plantation established there in 1850. These new sources of nutmeg meant that
30:28 Tracy V. Wilson? the price of nutmeg plummeted in North America in the mid to late 19th century. Eventually, control of the Banda Islands did return to the Dutch, but by that point, nutmeg trees had been transplanted to so many other places controlled by other countries that there was no way for the Dutch to reestablish a monopoly.
30:50 Holly Frey? Slavery was abolished in the Netherlands Indies in 1863. Japan invaded Indonesia during World War II, and Indonesia proclaimed its independence shortly after the Japanese surrender. Today, Indonesia is the source of about 75% of global nutmeg production. Grenada was producing about 20% of the world's nutmeg until Hurricane Ivan devastated the island's nutmeg trees in 2004. Since it takes roughly seven years for nutmeg trees to produce their first fruit after being planted, and it takes about 20 years for them to reach full productivity, the nutmeg industry on Grenada took a very long time to recover. Other sources of nutmeg includes Sri Lanka,
31:35 Holly Frey? India, China, and a number of islands off the coast of Africa and in the Caribbean.
31:41 Tracy V. Wilson? After another sponsor break, we will take a look at one of the weirder parts of nutmeg's history.
31:51 Holly Frey? Deanna Flores, flag football star, trailblazer, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, knows what pressure feels like. She knows what it takes to step up in the moment, and she knows that even the biggest achievement is never the end of the story.
32:04 Tracy V. Wilson? In the new podcast Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture, including sports, business, wellness, and entertainment, to find the whole person behind the public identity.
32:16 Holly Frey? Whether she's talking to an athlete on the field, a founder heading into a pitch, or a musician before a show, the conversation starts with the official bio ends.
32:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, Deanna shares her own experiences, questions, and even doubts. Her guests learn from her, she learns from them, and you might pick up something along the way. No lectures, no know-it-all host, just real people being real.
32:38 Holly Frey? Come curious and leave with something you can use.
32:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores out now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico.
32:55 Speaker 06 Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
33:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Veev Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, And everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only
34:08 Tracy V. Wilson? gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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35:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.
36:09 Holly Frey? As Europeans started colonizing the Americas, as we said earlier, they brought nutmeg with them. Nutmeg became less expensive and more widely available in the United States after the Dutch started to lose their monopoly. Between 1854 and 1868, 17 different mechanical nutmeg graders were patented in the United States, so that's an indication of how popular and available nutmeg was by then. Prior to that, though, nutmeg could be really expensive, so sometimes people made fake nutmegs out of wood to sell them to unsuspecting people
36:48 Holly Frey? in place of the real thing. Maybe. There's some debate about this. A dried whole nutmeg does look sort of like it's made of wood. It's feasible that someone could carve one and try to pass it off as the real thing, but nutmeg has a very distinct fragrance. It might not be as perceptible as a whole dried seed, especially somewhere like a store where it might be surrounded by other fragrant spices. But as soon as someone tried to grate it onto their food, it would be completely obvious that they were getting sawdust and not nutmeg. It would not take long for word to spread that so-and-so down at the Mercantile was selling wooden fake nutmegs.
37:32 Tracy V. Wilson? It might be more feasible for a traveling peddler who could leave town before people realized their nutmegs were fake, but if people knew there was a risk of buying wooden nutmegs, they could just take a great big sniff before buying. And if it didn't seem obvious at that point, insist on grating a tiny bit off to smell it before making a purchase.
37:55 Holly Frey? Another possibility is that importers and wholesalers were using wooden nutmegs to stretch out their stock, so mixing some wooden nutmegs into a barrel of real ones before shipping it out again. This is possibly a little bit more believable, although there are questions of how much it would have cost to pay someone to hand carve wooden nutmegs with a 19th century tool, and how that would compare to the cost of actually having real nutmegs.
38:24 Tracy V. Wilson? I read a whole paper on this, trying to work out whether it was economically feasible to con people in this way. Regardless of whether people really were passing off wooden nutmegs as the real thing, there was definitely a perception that this was happening. The Oxford English Dictionary defines wooden nutmeg as, quote, "a false or fraudulent thing, a fraud, cheat, or deception." Also, in more direct allusions, as representing the type of something useless or worthless. A lot of the uses of the term wooden nutmeg that the OED cites are about merchants and peddlers,
39:08 Tracy V. Wilson? specifically northern merchants and peddlers in the United States. In addition to the anti-northern bias shown there, some of these entries are also anti-Semitic. They compare these northern peddlers to Jewish peddlers, and then either imply or just flat out state that Jewish people are also dishonest.
39:31 Holly Frey? A number of these uses of the term wooden nutmeg are also particularly focused on peddlers from Connecticut. A lot of the nutmeg supply in North America came through Connecticut ports, which is connected to why one of the unofficial mottos for Connecticut is the Nutmeg State. And Connecticut residents are sometimes called nutmeggers.
39:54 Tracy V. Wilson? I was in Connecticut this weekend, and I mentioned that this was the topic of the episode that I was working on, and the Connecticut residents there immediately said, "Are you going to talk about Connecticut being the Nutmeg State?" Uh, the OED's First Use, reported for wooden nutmegs, is cited as being published in 1822. This was in "A Pedestrian Tour of Two Thousand Three Hundred Miles in North America to the Lakes, the Canadas, and the New England States, performed in the autumn of 1821, embellished with views by P. Stansbury, New York, 1822." That was published in North American Review.
40:39 Tracy V. Wilson? One section described a group of people encountered by this Mr. Stansbury, quote, "Among them were two persons whom he pronounces to have been, in the mild signification of the term, Boston Sharpers, and who commenced business by a boisterous colloquy about such smart men of their town, such and such sharp fellows in their neighborhood, and made many shrewd remarks concerning horse-dealing, swapping, purchasing molasses, and vending clocks, wooden bowls, and pumpkin pie dishes to the South Ward. We think we see the wicked smile of these rogues in making our poor pedestrians swallow
41:20 Tracy V. Wilson? all they chose to put themselves off for, and a high treat they must have had to see worthy Mr. Stansbury entering them in his notebook, first as horse-jockeys, then West India supercargoes, then traveling peddlers, or rather all at once, without the good man's dreaming of the hoax. The Boston folks are sharp indeed, rather too much so to blow themselves thus to Mr. Stansbury. We have no doubt he expected every moment to see the dogs pull out a bag of wooden nutmegs."
41:58 Holly Frey? Another early example is from 1836, in The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville by Thomas Halliburton, that was published in the Novus Scotian. This passage describes a Captain Allspice of Nahont, which is a town on a little peninsula in Massachusetts, roughly between Boston and He used to trade to Charleston and he carried a cargo once there of barrels of nutmegs. Well, he put half a bushel of good ones into each end of the barrel and the rest he filled up with wooden ones. So like the real thing, no soul could tell the difference until he bit one with his teeth and that he never thought of doing until he was first bit himself.
42:42 Holly Frey? Well, it's been a standing joke with them Southerners againus ever since. This work uses the term wooden nutmeg at two other points to describe someone as a cheat.
42:54 Tracy V. Wilson? The idea that Northerners, especially northern merchants and peddlers were con artists, even made its way into things like math problems. Elements of Algebra by Daniel Harvey Hill, published in 1857, included this word problem. Quote, "A Yankee mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, which cost him one quarter cent apiece, with a quality of real nutmegs worth four cents apiece, and sells the whole assortment for forty-four dollars and gains three dollars seventy-five cents by the fraud. How many wooden nutmegs were there? The answer, according to the textbook, is one hundred."
43:37 Tracy V. Wilson? I did some maths that came up with the answer one hundred, but I don't know if that's the way it was meant to be solved. Hill was a professor of mathematics and civil engineering at Davidson College in North Carolina and would go on to be a Confederate general. One of the sources used in this episode framed all of this as an example of southern attitudes toward the North in the years just before the US Civil War. But, uh, this book was also published in Philadelphia, so if that's the case, his northern publisher left it in there.
44:12 Holly Frey? The use of the term wooden nutmegs went on long past the end of the Dutch monopoly on the spice. A 1918 article by Logan Isray was published in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and it was titled "The Literary Spirit Among the Early Ohio Valley Settlers." This essay is about the availability of books and literature in the East Ohio Valley, and the state of the publishing and literary industries there. It reads in part, "How far the commercial desire inspired the Western writers one cannot tell, but it had some influence. Nor was there an entire lack of a book market in the Valley. One writer states that all the tin wagon, pit coal indigo, wooden nutmeg, and wooden
44:57 Holly Frey? clock peddlers of Connecticut then operating in the West had suddenly turned into book agents. Their books were said to be out-of-date editions and unsalable books of New England, refurnished with new dates and gaudy illustrations. We only need refer to tradition to prove how successful were these locusts in gulling the people. It may easily be surmised that many a Westerner imagined he could equal the literary work in these books."
45:25 Tracy V. Wilson? The use of the word wooden nutmegs to mean a dishonest cheat seems to have been most prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Nowadays, most of the uses of it that you'll see in newly published things like news articles, magazine articles, things like that, they are in discussions of wooden nutmegs and where that saying came from. Not, in most cases, somebody actually using it to describe someone else as untrustworthy.
45:54 Holly Frey? If you are about to go enjoy some eggnog, or sugar cookies, or pumpkin pie, or mold cider, or speculas, or sausage, or jerk chicken, or any of the many other dishes in the world that often include nutmeg, please enjoy, but not a whole giant spoonful, we beg. Please do not.
46:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, yeah, so that's Nutmeg. Um, I have a little listener mail also to take us out. Bring it on. Delicious episode. Um, this is from Ally and Ally wrote to us and said, hi, I love you guys. I've been listening to the podcast since I learned what podcasts were. Ha ha, at least a decade or so, my favorite show by far. I heard you all mention open access journals in an April episode and I thought that'd give you an insider look at this change in publication type. In the past, the payment for publishing journals came from the organizations that had a subscription and anyone who chose to pay individually to read them. The authors, researchers and scientists generally at universities did not pay to publish them and also receive no payment.
46:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Open access allows readers to view them for free. Amazing and how all of scientific information should work, but the researchers and professors now have to be the ones who pay to publish the article, about $3,000 US per article. Huge universities such as Duke might have a fund for this, but most universities and their professors have no money to do so. Therefore, this work now goes unpublished in those journals. More and more publishing companies are going open access because the payment they receive with certainty, about $3,000 from the professors, might be more than they would get from subscriptions. Scientists and researchers with smaller budgets, such as history professors, are finding it
47:43 Tracy V. Wilson? more and more difficult to publish their studies and work. The big budget R1 organizations are the ones who can afford it now. So, we both love and hate open access. Scientific information should be open to all and accessible for researchers to publish. Heart emoji. Love you all, Ally. Thank you, Ally, for this. Um, this is not really new information to me, but I thought it might be to our listeners. Uh, my opinion is that the entire ecosystem of academic journal publishing is very broken in a variety of ways. Um, because there's this whole issue, there are some resources.
48:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Available in some cases for people to get funding to pay that open access fee. I have somewhere on my computer, a bookmarked list of like one particular organization that has provided a lot of grant funding to researchers and one of the conditions is open access publishing that has been funded. So like there are some options for that, but of course those are in a limited supply and might not exist in all the different fields and specializations. There's just, I feel like every time I turn around a new headline about some kind of crisis in academic publishing, including widespread stuff making it through peer review that should
49:10 Tracy V. Wilson? not have and things being retracted that have gone on to just be the basis of multiple other papers later on. And for me, as a person who is working on a generalist podcast, that does not have a budget to pay individually for articles. Sometimes when I'm working on something like Unearthed, there might be hundreds of articles that I am looking at and there's no way to pay the somewhere between 30 and like $75 a piece to read every one of them.
49:48 Tracy V. Wilson? I do have multiple library cards to multiple library systems, including some academic libraries, but even with that, sometimes like if there's a paper behind a $75 paywall or whatever that I just don't have access to through any of those other resources, that's probably not getting used on the show. Occasionally it's a $75 paywall for a, an article that was published a century ago. And that gets very wild to me because eventually we get to the point where you would think that would be in the public domain, but it's still behind a paywall. So.
50:30 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of different ways to criticize and find frustration with this entire industry. And yet it's one that we rely on for our work and that, you know, people I know who are in academia also rely on for their work in a completely different way. So, thank you again, Ally, for that email and to everyone for listening to my rant about academic publishing. If you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're [email protected] . And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
51:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Deanna Flores is a flag football star, a trailblazer, an entrepreneur, and now host of a new podcast.
51:35 Holly Frey? In Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture to find the whole person behind the public identity.
51:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, you'll get to know Deanna, her guests, and even yourself a little better. No lectures, no know-it-all hosts, just real people being real.
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53:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else, isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.
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