Nutmeg mills.

Years ago I used to just scrape nutmegs with a knife.

Until I had a visitor from Germany who watched my cooking and exclaimed: "Why don't you use a nutmeg mill?"

Whu?

So I set about locating a nutmeg mill.

There are no nutmeg mills to be found in any stores in Helsinki. Or at least, that was the case 15 or so years ago, when I really did look everywhere. Part of the problem is that grocery stores don't stock whole nutmegs over here, cos of teenage abuse. It's a pity for cooks, cos pre-ground nutmeg just isn't the same. I'll not dwell on the idiocy of said abuse, except to say that no teenager abuses nutmeg twice: it's ghastly, and "gutblowing" describes the experience far better than mindblowing. I'm told. Me, I'm not into psychoactives at all, and never will be, and so I use nutmegs only in my cooking.

Anyway, the next time I was in Germany I visited cooking stores in order to find a nutmeg mill.

And I've bought one (or more) every time I've seen them, ever since. (Never in Finland - my latest find is from a tourist shop in Bodö, Norway, of all places.) So now I have three, cos I've given away a few of them, too. Here's a pic of them:
Pic: Three different nutmeg mills.

The one in the middle stores whole nutmegs in its flared-out waist, and all of them take a single nutmeg which is pressed by a spring onto the scraper bottom. They all work, but currently I like the peppermill-like one best, cos it's my newest.

Much better than scraping with a knife, are nutmeg mills.