Ground mace

One US cup of ground mace weighs 84.8 grams (3 ounces). Going the other way, 100 grams is about 1.18 cups.

Also called mace, mace powder, powdered mace, mace spice.

A teaspoon of ground mace weighs about 1.8 g, and a cup about 84.8 g (3 oz). USDA and the Shamrock Foodservice spice table agree within 8.4%.

Mace is the dried, lacy red covering, the aril, that wraps the seed of the nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans. Peeled off and dried, it turns orange-tan and is sold as whole pieces, called blades, or ground. Its flavour is like nutmeg's but warmer and more delicate, and it goes into pound cake, doughnuts, spice cookies and pumpkin pie, sausages and hot dogs, béchamel and other cream sauces, potted shrimp and pickling spice.

USDA's record for ground mace weighs a teaspoon at 1.7 g and a tablespoon at 5.3 g. The tablespoon, the more precise of the two, is 84.8 g a cup. The Shamrock Foodservice spice table gives 14.8 teaspoons of mace to the ounce of weight, which makes a cup 3.24 oz, or 91.9 g. The two are 8.4% apart, inside the 10% this site allows for spices, so this site publishes USDA's 84.8 g. Confidence is medium: these are the only two measurements found, and no ground-mace label gives grams for a spoonful.

Frontier Co-op counts 3 cups of its organic ground mace to the pound, 151.2 g a cup, 3.2 g a teaspoon. That would make ground mace a third heavier than ground nutmeg, which weighs 112 g a cup on this site and is ground from the dense seed that mace only wraps. Several of Frontier's powder pages show the same count of 4 cups a pound whatever the powder, so its powder counts are not reliable, and this one is listed without a figure.

King Arthur Baking's chart has no mace row.

The physical check: mace should be lighter than nutmeg by the spoon, and it is. Nutmeg is ground from a hard, dense kernel; mace from a thin, leathery net that grinds into a softer, flaky powder that does not settle as tightly. This site's ground nutmeg weighs 2.3 g a teaspoon, and mace 1.8 g, about a fifth less. Both are rich in oil, which makes the powders slightly clumpy, so a spoonful of either should be levelled with a knife rather than pressed into the spoon.

Practical guidance: use 1.8 g per teaspoon of ground mace, 5.3 g per tablespoon and about 85 g per cup. Most recipes call for a teaspoon or less, 1.8 g or less, so when a recipe gives mace by weight, a scale that reads to a tenth of a gram helps. Mace and nutmeg are often swapped one for one by volume; mace tastes milder and brighter. Ground mace loses its aroma faster than whole blades, so buy small jars and keep them closed.