Ingredients · Spice

Cloves

Syzygium aromaticum · Myrtaceae (myrtle family)

Cloves
An unopened flower bud, picked and dried until it looks like a small nail — which is where the name comes from, via Latin clavus. Cloves are the loudest spice in the cupboard: eugenol makes up somewhere between 45 and 90 per cent of the essential oil, and the smell is a dentist's office and Christmas at the same time. Twenty-seven products carry them, almost always in small amounts, because a clove too many takes over everything.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFlower bud
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromIndonesia (native range)
TasteHot, sweet, numbing and medicinal-warm

How to use it

Whole into a ham, a mulling pot, a pickling brine, a biryani or a pho broth, and fished out or left behind. Ground into gingerbread, pumpkin pie, spice cake and masala chai. Use less than you think: one or two whole cloves will flavour a whole pot. A clove-studded onion is the classic way to season a béchamel or a stock.

With food

Ham and pork. Orange. Apple and pear. Onion. Red wine. Beef stew. Carrot and squash. Chocolate.

With spices

Cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice — the baking-spice chord. Star anise, fennel, cinnamon and Szechuan pepper for five-spice. Cardamom, ginger and black pepper for chai. Bay and peppercorn in a brine.

With tea

Masala chai above all. Assam and Ceylon black tea. Rooibos, for a caffeine-free spiced cup.

Its story

Where it comes from

Before colonial expansion, cloves grew on five volcanic islands in the North Moluccas and nowhere else: Bacan, Makian, Moti, Ternate and Tidore. Today the main producers are Indonesia, Madagascar, Tanzania, Sri Lanka and the Comoros. Shop notes name no lot origin.

What happened

A Han-dynasty text has ministers sucking cloves to sweeten their breath before speaking to the emperor. Cloves turned up in a burned-down house at Terqa on the Euphrates dated to 1720 BC, three thousand miles from the only islands that grew them. Arab traders knew the source and kept it; Ibn Sina called the spice jansi ban, the Banda nut. The Portuguese reached the clove islands in the early sixteenth century and the Dutch East India Company took the trade in the seventeenth, concentrating cultivation on Ambon, obliging the population to sell the entire harvest at a fixed price, and uprooting and burning every clove tree outside its control on annual expeditions rowed by thousands of Ambonese under forced labour. West Seram was subdued by cutting down its clove trees, destroying the habitat and deporting the survivors as thinly as possible across other islands. In 1770 men acting for Pierre Poivre stole seedlings and carried them to Mauritius and the Seychelles, and the monopoly ended. From 1828 the Sultan of Zanzibar ordered cloves planted there; in the 1850s an estimated two thirds of Zanzibar's population were enslaved, most of the men put to work in the clove and coconut plantations. Britain forced abolition in 1897.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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