Cloves Syzygium aromaticum
An unopened flower bud, dried. The most concentrated spice in the rack — four cloves will season a whole ham, and six will ruin it.
2 recipes on this site
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
Count them
Clove is the one spice where the difference between right and wrong is two or three buds. Recipes specify a number rather than a spoonful for a reason. When in doubt use fewer — you can never take it back out.
Stud, do not scatter
Pushing whole cloves into an onion, a ham or an orange gives you slow, even release and lets you retrieve them. Loose whole cloves in a stew are a bad mouthful waiting for someone.
It goes in early
Whole cloves need time and liquid to give up their oil. Into the braise or the mulled wine at the start. Ground clove is the opposite and can go in late, because it releases immediately.
Beyond the kitchen
DENTISTRY
Eugenol has been used as a dental analgesic and antiseptic for well over a century, and zinc oxide eugenol is still a standard temporary filling and dressing material. The distinctive smell of an old-fashioned dental surgery is largely this.
KRETEK CIGARETTES
Indonesia consumes an enormous share of the world's clove crop in kretek — clove cigarettes — which at times has accounted for the majority of global demand. Clove pricing is therefore driven as much by tobacco as by food.
POMANDERS
An orange studded all over with cloves and rolled in spices was a medieval and early modern European household object, hung in rooms and wardrobes. It survives as a Christmas craft, and it genuinely does keep for years.
THE MONOPOLY
For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch East India Company enforced a clove monopoly by destroying trees outside authorised islands. It broke in the 1770s when a French administrator, Pierre Poivre, smuggled seedlings out to Mauritius and Réunion.
A longer history
Cloves grew naturally on only a handful of small volcanic islands in the northern Malukus, and for most of history that was the sole source on earth. Archaeological claims of cloves in second-millennium BCE Mesopotamia are disputed, but they are securely attested in Han-dynasty China, where court officials are recorded holding them in the mouth before addressing the emperor.
They reached Rome by the first century — Pliny describes them — and moved along Indian Ocean and overland routes at prices that made them a luxury for well over a thousand years. The concentration of supply in one tiny archipelago made cloves among the most strategically valuable commodities in the world, and the European scramble for the Spice Islands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was substantially about them.
The Dutch monopoly, and its violent enforcement, was broken by smuggled seedlings in the 1770s, after which cultivation spread to Mauritius, Réunion, Zanzibar and Madagascar. Zanzibar's clove plantations reshaped East African economies and labour in the nineteenth century, and Indonesia today is both the largest producer and the largest consumer of its own crop.
