A Suspicion of Nutmeg

Long before the level teaspoon, a recipe asked you to feel your way into the food.

The other day I came across an article celebrating Fannie Farmer and her contribution to the culinary world. If you don't know her, she was the New England cook and teacher who, in 1896, published The Boston Cooking-School Cook Bookand became known as the mother of level measurements. Before Fannie, a recipe might tell you to add butter "the size of an egg," to bake in a "slow oven," or to use "flour enough to make a stiff dough." She gave us the teaspoon and the level cup. She made cooking reproducible, teachable, and reachable for people who had never stood at a grandmother's elbow learning by watching. The article was making the case that she did more than anyone in America to standardize cooking and open the kitchen to everyone, and my first response was simple and warm. Good for her. What a gift.

And then I sat with it a little longer, the way I do, and I found myself drawn to deeper inquiry about what it really meant to standardize our kitchens and the way we nourish ourselves and our loved ones.

Because before Fannie, it was not unusual to find a recipe, often handwritten and passed down through a family, that asked for a splash of this or a dash of that, a pinch, a hint, and my favorite of all of them, the one I keep returning to as a beacon of invitation, a suspicion of nutmeg.

When I first read that phrase as a direction in a recipe, I will admit it sounded like something out of a potion book. A suspicion of nutmeg. It made me chuckle, but it also gave me pause. What in the world was a "suspicion," and how did you know if you got it right?

A Way of Knowing

Turns out the word suspicion is not an accident, nor is it plain whimsy. In French, the word for a tiny trace of something in a dish is soupçon, and soupçon is the very same word the French use for a suspicion. A hunch. A sense of something before you can prove it. So when that old recipe asked for a suspicion of nutmeg, it was not being vague at all. It was naming a way of knowing. A suspicion is what you feel at the edge of your awareness, the thing your senses have already registered before your mind has caught up enough to put a number on it. The recipe was not telling you how much. It was telling you to use your senses.

And once you feel that, the phrase opens all the way up into an invitation to be in relationship with yourself, your palate, your kitchen, your spices, the other people you might be preparing a meal for. Relationship.

Fannie was brilliant, and it was a beautiful thing for her to think this way. Her own words tell you she understood exactly what she was doing, because she wrote that good judgment and experience had taught some cooks to measure by sight, while the majority needed definite guides. The teaspoon was a bridge for the cook who had not yet developed the sensing, a place to stand until the body learned what enough felt like. What her gift also did, quietly, was signal a change in how we relate to our food.

Cooking Is Alchemy

Cut to the modern world, where not only do we standardize recipes, but we also typically outsource the making of them. It is a rare person in today's world who truly cooks from scratch and without a standardized recipe. Don't get me wrong, I love a good cookbook and I have bookshelves in the kitchen filled to the brim with a wide variety of culinary directories. I call it the "old-school google." When people come to this kitchen to cook, I ask them to put their phones and laptops away and peruse an old book. But even this is a degree of separation from really understanding our food, ways to prepare, the science of why things interact the way they do. At its very core, cooking is alchemy. And alchemy requires curiosity, observation, and relationship.

This is what draws me in, and it reaches far beyond nutmeg. When we feel our way into what we are eating, we stay in a kind of conversation with our food, an ongoing relationship with the very thing that becomes us. The more of that sensing we hand over to the label, the app, the plan, and the precise gram, the easier it is to drift out of that conversation without quite noticing. I am not saying the measurements are the problem. I am wondering, out loud, what happens to us when they become the only voice in the kitchen.

What the old language was holding, without ever naming it, was that relationship. A living, sensing, participatory relationship between the cook and the meal, and between a woman and the way she nourishes the people she loves.

The Sense Beneath the Senses

There is a name for the faculty those recipes were calling on. Interoception is your felt sense of the internal landscape of your own body, the steady inward stream of information that tells you what is happening inside you. It is the sense underneath all the others, every bit as real as sight or hearing, and it is at work in you right now. A suspicion of nutmeg lives there. It is the nose that knows when the warmth is right, the hand that knows when to stop, the quiet inner registering of yes, that, there that arrives a half second before language. Your body offers that knowing all the time. The invitation is simply to listen for it again.

What the Machine Cannot Taste

And I think about this so much right now, in this particular moment we are living through, because we are being handed extraordinary tools that will measure, calculate, optimize, and decide on our behalf faster than we ever could. I am not against any of that. But it makes one human capacity more precious, not less. Our sensory ways of knowing are becoming something close to a superpower, precisely because they are the one thing the machine cannot do for us. No tool can taste your dinner for you. No algorithm can feel the suspicion of nutmeg rise in your own chest. That knowing is yours, and it is one of the last things that is irreducibly, gorgeously yours.

Coherence Begins in the Kitchen

This is what I mean when I talk about coherence. Coherence is what happens when your physical knowing, your emotional knowing, your thinking mind, your soul's sense of what matters, and your felt connection to the larger living world all come into the same conversation at the same time, the way they did, easily, over a bowl and a wooden spoon, in a kitchen a hundred and fifty years ago. When you can feel a suspicion of nutmeg, you are not only seasoning a dish. You are practicing the very attunement that lets you sense what your whole life is asking for.

The kitchen is simply the most delicious place to begin.

So as you can see, at the end of the day, this article isn't really about cooking, but nonetheless, here is what I want to invite you to try. The next time you cook, choose one thing, the salt, the lemon, the nutmeg if you have it, and set the measuring spoon down, just for that one ingredient. Go looking, in your own body, for the suspicion. Notice what it feels like to add until something in you says there. You may land somewhere different than you expected, and that is part of it, because you are not reaching for precision. You are reaching back toward relationship, and toward the knowing your body has been quietly keeping for you all along, waiting for you to ask.

A suspicion of nutmeg, it turns out, was never a vague instruction.

It was an invitation to trust yourself.

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Dr. Stephanie Shelburne is the Executive Director of The New England School of Bioenergetic Medicine and the creator of Your Sacred Metabolism®. She writes from a farm in New England