How the warmth of mace restores 'hope'
Ground mace made its way into my masala dabba last week. Mace is used a lot in Kashmiri cuisine — and yet, for me, it’s never been a favoured spice.
Not until now.
I began to notice mace in Dad’s cooking when my two sons were small. Every week, he would drive to my door to deliver food for my fridge, though we lived more than an hour’s drive apart. It was his way of loving us.
Dad delivered dal. Sometimes, khoya — he bought materials from a local Indian grocer — made with jaggery, and cumin seed and green peas. Baingan. Lotus root sabzi. Homemade paneer, if we were lucky. And kaddu — spicy sweet sabzi he cooked with Cailean and Ash in mind.
Dad’s kaddu was confronting. Such concentrated, sweet heat. Ash, then two years old, would eat it by the fistful, tears streaming down his face at the intensity of flavour, even as he shoved more and more into his open mouth.
Ash has always been driven to eat from the cup of ‘too much’.
The dish was intense — there was the pumpkin itself, with its rich, creamy consistency. But it was the spice that tipped his sabzi over into full flavour abandon — cinnamon quills, ground cinnamon, Kashmiri red chilli, ginger, jaggery and mace.
Sweet, on top of warm, on top of heat. And yet, of all the spices used, it was only the last that I found a challenge.
Mace is a flounce of penetrative warmth chased by a bright citric kick. Its profile is a deep embrace. A slow beating heart when the world around is crazed and you need a still love upon which to rest your cheek.
And yet, its seduction was the very thing I was resisting.
At that time in my life, fighting to re-find identity in motherhood after birthing two children, I didn’t want to rest.
My drive was to move forward. To discover a world apart from the one I’d grown up in, and a new sense of belonging within it.
I set mace aside.
Then, last night I rode my bike home in a rainstorm with my eldest son, Cailean, now almost twelve years old. It was wild. We had rain in our eyes and the wind in our laughing mouths, finally riding into our gate, wet to the bone.
We dried up and changed, and cuddled beneath a blanket on the couch. My thoughts turned to mace and I knew instantly why that spice had found its way back into my hands this past week.
I’m ready to rest my cheek against that slow steady heartbeat. On Tuesday morning, I will be flying home.
In September last year, Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He has been in New Delhi. I have been in Margaret River, Western Australia. Like many families, ours is not a straightforward dynamic.
The building of my 'Spice Mistress' persona has occurred outside his gaze, and so, this is the chance for me to feed him in the same way he once fed me.
There’s healing in that.
When I arrive at his home, I will make kaddu, redolent of cinnamon and jaggery. Fresh ginger for smiling warmth that serves as an echo of mace flower and its slow opening heat.
I will prepare paneer with winter carrots and ground mace — a welcome citric brick in a wall of earthy cumin and floral Indian bay leaf.
I will entice him with chicken curry — rich with nourishment — with methi and a pretty hit of mace for a top note of sweet.
All of this is a language that he and I understand. There is hope in a shared plate. And connection.
In these days that we will have together, as our relationship reforms, this is how I will use mace.