Clove

• 1. Introduction

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  Clove is a spice so ancient that ministers of a Han Dynasty emperor were required to hold one in their mouths before speaking to the ruler. The rule appears in a Chinese text dated to around 200 BC, and it tells you something about the clove's singular power: not just that it was prized, but that it was trusted as a kind of social necessity, a freshener of breath for the most formal moments at court. What exactly is this small flower bud, and how did it travel from a handful of remote Indonesian islands to the cabinets of rulers, the cargo holds of warships, and the spice jars in kitchens across the world? The answers reach back more than three thousand years, and they involve archaeologists, colonial monopolies, a Frenchman who reportedly stole seedlings from the world's oldest known clove tree, and a flameship that sank off Sweden on its way to a royal summit.

• 2. Born in the Moluccas

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  Syzygium aromaticum, the tree that produces cloves, is native to the Maluku Islands of Indonesia, also known historically as the Spice Islands. Until the colonial era, cloves grew on only a few of these islands: Bacan, Makian, Moti, Ternate, and Tidore. The tree is an evergreen, growing between 8 and 12 meters tall, with large leaves and crimson flowers bunched at the tips of branches. The flower buds begin pale, then shift through green, and arrive at a bright red when they are ready for picking. Harvesters collect them at roughly 1.5 to 2 centimeters long, before the petals open. That small, closed ball at the top of the calyx is the clove itself. The name reflects its shape: the word clove entered English in the 15th century through Middle English and Old French, and traces back to the Latin clavus, meaning "nail." The Austronesian peoples first carried cloves into wider trade networks beginning around 1500 BC, making cloves one of the oldest commodities in long-distance maritime commerce.

• 3. Ancient Footprints

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  In 1978, archaeologist Giorgio Buccellati reported a discovery from Terqa, Syria, that pushed the western history of cloves far earlier than anyone had assumed. Inside a burned-down house dated to 1720 BC, during the kingdom of Ḫana, Buccellati found cloves. This was the first evidence of the spice reaching the western world before Roman times, and the detail matters because it proves that long-distance spice movement was operating millennia before the familiar classical trade routes. Cloves eventually reached Rome by the first century AD. At the Batujaya site, a single clove turned up in a waterlogged layer dated to between the 100s BC and 200s BC, corresponding to the Buni culture. At Óc Eo in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, a site occupied from the first to the eighth century BC, researchers found starch grains from cloves on the stone tools used to process food. Óc Eo served as a trading center for the kingdom of Funan. Two cloves were excavated at the Sri Lankan city of Mantai, dated to around 900-1100 AD. Archaeologists working on the Gribshunden, a Danish-Norwegian flagship that sank near Ronneby, Sweden, in June 1495, recovered what are considered the earliest macro-botanical cloves yet found in northwest Europe. King Hans was sailing to a political summit at Kalmar when the ship went down; the cloves on board, along with ginger, peppercorns, and saffron, were likely carried as luxury goods intended to impress the assembled nobles and church officials.

• 4. Spice, Smoke, and Ceremony

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  Cloves occupy a remarkably wide range of uses, and the kitchen is only the beginning. Across Asian, African, Mediterranean, and Near and Middle Eastern cuisines, they flavor meats, curries, and marinades, and pair with fruit like apples, pears, and rhubarb. In Mexican cooking, cloves go by clavos de olor and frequently appear alongside cumin and cinnamon. Peruvian dishes such as carapulcra and arroz con leche include them. In Malay cooking, they belong to a group called rempah empat beradik, a phrase meaning "four sibling spices," paired with cinnamon, cardamom, and star anise. A major part of the spice's flavor comes from eugenol, a chemical that also carries clove's distinctive aroma. Beyond food, cloves figure in Indonesian kretek cigarettes, which were also smoked across Europe, Asia, and the United States. In September 2009, the United States reclassified clove cigarettes as cigars, following a federal ban on flavored cigarettes. In Victorian England, a pomander made by studding an orange with cloves served as a fragrant gift; receiving one was understood to mean the giver felt warmth toward you. The spice also features in traditional embalming recipes, including those recorded by the Dutch physician Pieter Van Foreest, one of which described a method used by his colleagues Spierinck and Goethals. Clove pollen found in a burial from the Grote Kerk of Breda, in a tomb used between 1475 and 1526 AD by eight members of the house of Nassau, came from the burial of Cimberga van Baden.

• 5. The Colonial Chokehold

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  During the colonial era, cloves were traded with the same strategic weight as oil, with strict limits placed on how much could leave the islands. The Dutch East India Company, which consolidated control of the spice trade in the 17th century, wanted a clove monopoly to match the one it had achieved with nutmeg. But the geography of the clove tree worked against that ambition. Unlike nutmeg and mace, which grew only in the tiny Banda Islands and could be more easily policed, clove trees spread across the full breadth of the Moluccas, and the company simply did not have the reach to contain them. The most famous clove tree associated with this period stands on the island of Ternate, where a specimen named Afo is believed by experts to be the oldest living clove tree in the world, estimated at 350-400 years old. Tourists are told that seedlings from Afo were smuggled off the island by a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre in 1770. Those seedlings were reportedly taken first to the Isle de France, which is modern Mauritius, and later moved to Zanzibar, which became at one point the largest producer of cloves in the world. The shift of production out of the Moluccas and into new regions reshaped global supply permanently.

• 6. Eugenol and Its Effects

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  Eugenol makes up between 72 and 90 percent of the essential oil extracted from cloves, which is why the spice's smell is so immediately recognizable. Complete extraction of the oil in pressurized water occurs at 80 minutes at 125 degrees Celsius. Ultrasound-assisted and microwave-assisted methods can extract it faster and with lower energy use. Beyond the kitchen, eugenol has a documented role in pain relief. Clove oil containing eugenol has shown effectiveness for toothache and other types of pain, and cloves have long been used in traditional medicine as an analgesic, particularly for dental emergencies. One review found that eugenol combined with zinc oxide worked as an analgesic for alveolar osteitis, a painful condition sometimes called dry socket. Clove essential oil has also shown the ability to inhibit Enterococcus faecalis bacteria, which can persist after a failed root canal treatment, and to prevent mold growth on certain foods. Research into other proposed benefits, including fever reduction, mosquito repellency, and blood sugar regulation, has not produced conclusive results. The US Food and Drug Administration has not approved clove for any medicinal purpose, and oral use carries risk for people with liver disease, blood clotting disorders, immune disorders, or food allergies. The current leaders in global clove production are Indonesia, Madagascar, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, and Comoros, with Indonesia producing the most, though only about 10-15% of its output is exported.