'Tis the season for warm, spicy cookies and dishes laced with the taste of Christmas. Pour yourself and your guests some eggnog... and don't forget the light dusting of poison on top.
No, this isn't a murder mystery. Nutmeg, a spice used in much of the holiday season's cooking, is actually a poison, according to The New York Times.
Nutmeg was used in the Middle Ages to end unwanted pregnancies. Prisoners have used it as a substitute for drugs and teens trying to get high have ended up calling the number on Mr. Yuck stickers.
"It's not that nutmeg cases are that common," Dr. Leon Gussow, an Illinois toxicologist, told The New York Times, "but toxicologists do recognize it as one of the more interesting spices in the kitchen."
Nutmeg, the seed of evergreen tree Myristica fragrans, is native to Indonesia and has been used as a food preservative, an ingredient in mace and for the treatment of rheumatism, cholera and gastrointestinal distress, according to Emergency Medicine News. It also has been used for its psychotropic side effects.
In the "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," the imprisoned activist wrote, "I first got high in Charlestown on nutmeg. My cellmate was among at least a hundred nutmeg men who, for money or cigarettes, bought from kitchen-worker inmates penny matchboxes full of stolen nutmeg. I grabbed a box as though it were a pound of heavy drugs. Stirred into a glass of cold water, a penny matchbox full of nutmeg had the kick of three or four reefers."
Trying out the "nutmeg high" is not as Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test-y as it may sound. It takes two tablespoons of the spice to start you on your hallucinatory quest - with "intense nausea, dizziness, extreme dry mouth and a lingering slowdown of normal brain function," according to The New York Times. Gussow compared chasing the nutmeg dragon to a two-day hangover.
"People have told me that it feels like you are encased in mud," said Dr. Edward Boyer, chief of medical toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, according to The New York Times. "You're not exactly comatose, but you feel really sluggish. And your remembrance of events during this time period is incomplete at best."
Myristicin, a compound in nutmeg, is a member of a psychoactive family of drugs often used to make bigger, "badder" drugs, like MMDA. Myristicin is also similar to safrole, another element of nutmeg, that is sometimes used to manufacture the illegal street drug Ecstasy.
These compounds themselves will not have you jumping to thumping music and twirling glow sticks at a rave ensconced in some abandoned warehouse or barn. "But a junior chemist might think that you are going to end up with a similar effect," Boyer told The New York Times.
"We do see a few pediatric cases where parents left an open spice jar where a child could reach it," Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University Dr. Patrick Lank told The New York Times. "Adolescents can have really bad effects when they mix nutmeg with other things."
So baker beware, but baker, be smart. If you're making a cake that includes nutmeg, the little sprinkle of spice the recipe calls for is not a danger. Everything in moderation, as they say.
Now, go enjoy that 'nog.
