Cloves

• laungलौंग

  Hindi

• clavo de olor

  Spanish

• qurunful

  Arabic

• cengkeh

  Indonesian

• karanfil

  Turkish

• karafuu

  Swahili — Zanzibar and the Tanzanian coast

Sweet and hot-tasting without being pungent in the chilli or pepper sense, with strong bitterness and astringency behind it and a mild anaesthetic effect on the tongue. It is the least forgiving common spice: correctly judged it gives depth to everything around it, and slightly overdone it turns the whole dish medicinal.

Intensely warm, sweet and medicinal, with a distinct numbing, antiseptic edge that most people recognise from a dentist before they place it in food.

Dark red-brown, oily-looking whole buds with a paler ball-shaped head; ground clove is a deep chocolate brown.

Hard, dense and woody whole — cloves do not soften in cooking and are picked out or strained, never eaten. Ground clove is fine and slightly oily, and cakes readily.

• Eugenol — Overwhelmingly dominant in clove bud oil, and responsible for essentially the whole character — warm, sweet, medicinal and numbing.
• Eugenyl acetate — A softer, rounder companion note to eugenol itself.
• β-Caryophyllene — A woody, faintly peppery background.

Use whole wherever the dish allows it. Bloom whole cloves briefly in hot fat with the other whole spices at the start of a South Asian dish, or add them to a liquid to infuse and remove them before serving. Where ground clove is needed, add it late and in less quantity than instinct suggests — it disperses completely and cannot be taken back out. An onion studded with a few cloves and a bay leaf is the classic way to flavour a stock while keeping every clove retrievable.

Cloves work in two quite separate registers. In South and Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern and North African cooking they are an everyday savoury spice, used whole and in small numbers in rice dishes, braises, stocks and warm blends. In European and North American cooking they are concentrated into a handful of fixed preparations — ham, pickling, mulled wine, mixed spice and Christmas baking — with a strong seasonal association. Across both, the governing rule is quantity: cloves are counted, not spooned, and the difference between three and six in a pot is easily tasted.

• grinding — Cloves are hard and oily and grind poorly in a light mill, tending to gum rather than powder. Ground clove also loses its top notes quickly and keeps its bitterness, so old ground clove is disproportionately medicinal.
• infusing — Whole cloves in a warm liquid give up their aroma steadily and can be removed once the extraction has gone far enough. This is the safest way to use them, because it is reversible in a way that grinding into a mixture is not.
• toasting — Brief dry heat lifts the aroma, but cloves are already oil-rich and scorch quickly, turning acrid. There is less to gain here than with seed spices.
• frying — Whole cloves are commonly bloomed in hot fat at the start of a South Asian dish, where they perfume the oil in seconds. They should be added with the other whole spices and not left to darken.

Press a whole clove firmly with a thumbnail. A good one is slightly yielding, releases a bead of oil and smells immediately; a spent one is brittle, snaps dry and smells faintly of wood. Floating buds head-up in water is sometimes offered as a test, and it is a weak proxy at best — it reflects density rather than aroma.

• Pale, shrivelled or dusty buds
• No oil released under pressure
• A flat, woody smell with the sweetness gone
• Caking or clumping in ground clove

• Volatilisation of eugenol and the lighter aromatics
• Oxidation of the oil to resinous, flat off-notes
• Moisture uptake and caking in ground clove

Buy whole, with one honest exception. Whole cloves keep far better, let you see the quality you are getting, can be fished out of a dish, and are the form nearly every traditional use calls for. Against that, cloves are genuinely awkward to grind at home — hard, oily and inclined to gum up a small mill. If a recipe needs a smooth ground clove in a baked mixture, a small jar of ground clove bought fresh and used quickly is a reasonable compromise, not a failure of principle.

• Plump buds with the round head still attached, not headless stalks.
• A slightly oily feel, and oil visible when a bud is pressed with a nail.
• Deep, even red-brown colour rather than pale or greyish.
• Immediate aroma on opening the jar, without having to crush anything.
• Little loose stalk, dust or mother of cloves in the packet.

Trade grades distinguish whole hand-picked buds from lower classes carrying headless cloves, stems and mother of cloves, with volatile oil content the underlying measure. Origin names such as Zanzibar, Madagascar and Penang are also used commercially, and describe provenance and typical character, not a formal quality ranking.

Myrtaceae

A slow-maturing evergreen tree reaching some 10 to 20 metres, with glossy aromatic leaves. It takes several years from planting before a tree bears usefully, which is part of why clove supply responds slowly to price.

The northern Maluku islands of eastern Indonesia — historically Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian and Bacan — where the clove tree grew wild and nowhere else.

• Indonesia — origin. Both the centre of origin and, by a wide margin, the largest producer — though most of that crop is consumed domestically rather than exported.
• Madagascar — major producer. A principal source of internationally traded cloves.
• Tanzania (Zanzibar and Pemba) — major producer. Established as a clove economy in the nineteenth century and long identified with the spice.
• Sri Lanka — notable producer
• Comoros — notable producer
• Netherlands — historic producer. Not a grower, but the controlling power in the trade for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Buds are picked by hand when they have swollen and turned from green to pink, immediately before opening. Timing is the whole craft: picked early the bud is thin and low in oil, and once the flower opens the commercial product is lost. The clusters are picked from the tree without stripping the leaves, which damages the following season.

1. Picking — Clusters of unopened buds are picked by hand at the pink stage.Why: Captures the bud at maximum oil content before it flowers.
2. Separating — Buds are separated from their stalks. The stalks are a distinct, much cheaper product with their own oil.
3. Sun drying — Buds are dried, usually in the sun over several days, until they turn dark red-brown and become hard and brittle.Why: Drives off water, concentrates the oil and gives the bud its characteristic snap.
4. Cleaning and grading — Dried buds are cleaned and graded on colour, size, oil content and the proportion of defects such as headless cloves and mother of cloves.

Commercial grading turns on colour, uniformity, volatile oil content and the proportion of defective material — principally "headless" cloves that have lost their bud head, stems, and mother of cloves. A good lot is plump, oily and uniformly dark; a poor one is thin, pale and full of stalk.

The characteristic problem is not a foreign substance but a depleted one: buds from which the volatile oil has already been distilled are dried and sold as whole spice. They look broadly right and smell weakly. Stalk and mother of cloves are also blended into low grades to make weight, and ground clove — where none of this is visible — is the easier vehicle for all of it.

Grown as a long-lived plantation tree, usually with shade in the early years. Yield is notoriously irregular from season to season, with heavy years followed by light ones, so a single harvest figure says little about a plantation.

Humid equatorial lowlands with high, well-distributed rainfall and no marked dry season. Cloves are intolerant of drought and of waterlogging alike, which narrows the suitable ground considerably.

Cloves grew wild on a handful of small islands in the northern Malukus and nowhere else, yet reached China, India, the Roman Mediterranean and beyond long before any European knew where they came from. That gap between universal demand and a pinpoint source made cloves one of the most fought-over commodities in world history.

1. Han dynasty China · China

   Cloves are recorded in Chinese use, including the court practice of holding a clove in the mouth before addressing the emperor.

   Among the earliest documentary attestations, and evidence that the spice was travelling a very long way from the Malukus at an early date.

2. Roman period · Roman Mediterranean

   Cloves appear in classical Mediterranean sources, though without any accurate knowledge of their origin.

   Demonstrates a functioning long-distance trade whose supply end was entirely opaque to its buyers.

3. Seventeenth century · Maluku Islands

   The Dutch East India Company enforces a monopoly, concentrating clove cultivation on Ambon and destroying trees elsewhere in the archipelago.

   A deliberate restriction of a species to defend a price — and a lasting grievance in the islands themselves.

4. Eighteenth century

   Clove plants are removed from the Dutch-controlled islands and established elsewhere, ending the monopoly over the following decades.

   The point at which cloves became an ordinary tropical crop rather than a strategic asset.

5. Nineteenth century · Zanzibar and Pemba

   Zanzibar and Pemba are developed into major clove producers under Omani rule, worked substantially by enslaved people.

   The clove economy of East Africa was built on slave labour, and the spice cannot be given an uncomplicated history.

For most of recorded history the clove trade was defined by the mismatch between a worldwide market and a source of a few square kilometres. Control of that source — by Maluku sultanates, then the Portuguese, then the Dutch — was worth extraordinary violence. Today the pattern has inverted completely: Indonesia is both the largest producer and the largest consumer, because the majority of its crop goes into kretek clove cigarettes, not into food or export.

Clove and clove oil have a long documented history of use for toothache across several traditions, and eugenol is still used in dentistry as a topical agent. Recorded here as documented practice and pharmacological background, not as a health recommendation.