Ground nutmeg

One US cup of ground nutmeg weighs 112 grams (4 ounces). Going the other way, 100 grams is about 0.89 cups.

TL;DR: **One US cup of ground nutmeg weighs about 112 g (7 g per tablespoon, 2.3 g per teaspoon).** USDA FoodData Central and every downstream reference converge on this figure within a 7% spread. King Arthur does not publish a weight for nutmeg in their Ingredient Weight Chart, though they do sell the ground product, leaving ExactCups' figure the closest thing to a definitive baker's reference.

Ground nutmeg is the seed of the evergreen tree *Myristica fragrans*, native to the Banda Islands of Indonesia and now cultivated across Sri Lanka, Grenada, and India. The whole seed is dried inside its lacy red aril — that aril, dried and ground separately, is the spice mace. Mace and nutmeg come from the same fruit but differ in oil profile, colour, and density; they are not one-to-one weight substitutes even though they share flavour compounds. This entry covers the seed only.

The density convergence is unusually clean for a spice. USDA FDC 171326 lists 7 g per tablespoon, which extrapolates directly to 112 g per US cup. Aqua-calc, which references USDA, reports the same 112 g/cup (and 118 g per metric cup, the same physical density expressed against Europe's 250 mL cup). Pantrymath's independent ingredient reference lands on 112 g/cup and 7 g/tbsp as well. The one meaningful outlier is Chefs-Resources' professional kitchen chart at 0.40 teaspoons per gram, which extrapolates to 120 g/cup — slightly heavier due to standard-jar particle size and settling in commercial kitchens. That is a 7% spread from the USDA anchor to the kitchen upper bound, well under ExactCups' 10% milled tolerance.

One caveat is worth stating clearly. USDA's own teaspoon portion is listed as 2.2 g, which back-extrapolates to only 105.6 g/cup — a 6% understatement of USDA's own tablespoon figure. This is a rounding artifact: USDA rounds low-weight tsp portions to one decimal place, and the tablespoon value (7 g) is the physical density figure that density-conversion sites reference. When adapting a recipe by weight, 2.3 g per teaspoon is closer to physical reality than the rounded 2.2 g.

Ground nutmeg is oily — roughly 36% fat by weight, one of the fattiest common spices — which explains both its density and its clumping behaviour. The essential oil (5-15% by weight) and the fixed oil (called nutmeg butter) coat particles and cause them to settle tighter than dry, fibrous spices like ground ginger (about 96 g/cup) or the waxy denseness of ground turmeric (144 g/cup). This oil content is also why ground nutmeg loses potency far faster than whole nutmeg: the volatile aromatics evaporate through the powder's surface area within months of grinding. Bakers who grate whole nutmeg fresh get a fluffier product that measures 5-10% lighter per cup and delivers dramatically more flavour per gram — the reason serious pastry kitchens buy whole nutmegs and a Microplane rather than pre-ground jars.

Practical baker recommendation: weigh at 7 g per tablespoon or 2.3 g per teaspoon. For freshly grated whole nutmeg, use the same weight target but expect one Microplane pass to yield roughly a rounded quarter-teaspoon of shavings. When adapting older recipes that specify "1/4 nutmeg, grated" — a common 19th-century notation — a whole nutmeg weighs about 5-8 g, so a quarter is 1-2 g, roughly a level half-teaspoon of the pre-ground product.