Holiday Cooking – Cloves

This month I’m back to learning more about the plants that flavor my holiday baking. Today it is cloves, which I use to flavor pumpkin and vegetable breads, pumpkin pie, and cookies. I also use whole cloves, along with cinnamon sticks, to flavor hot apple cider. For years my maternal grandmother, Grandma Char, hung a string of cloved oranges over the sink in her kitchen. Whole cloves were pushed into a fresh orange like little tacks, and seemed to preserve the orange as it dried and hardened. The aromatic mixture of clove and orange oil was released into her tiny kitchen as it heated up from the hot stove or steaming kettle.

Syzygium aromaticum is in the Myrtaceae (or Myrtle) family, and originated in the Molucca Islands (or Spice Islands) in the Indonesian archipelago north of Australia. Cloves have been used to sweeten breath in China; increase male potency, warm cold feet, and cure gout in Europe; keep evil spirits out of body openings through nose and lip clove piercings in the East Indies; used as a local anesthetic for dentistry in Germany; and flavored food, cigarettes, and perfume worldwide.

Cloves have also caused bloodshed as the Portuguese, Dutch, and English sought to control production and distribution in turn. Clove production in the Molucca Islands was tightly controlled from the 1500s through 1700s to the point that wild or privately grown clove trees were destroyed, smuggling cloves was punishable by death, and an estimated 60,000 islanders were massacred. In 1753, a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre (or Peter Piper, of “picked a peck of pickled peppers” fame), smuggled clove plants out of the Molucca Islands and grew them successfully on the Isle de France for presentation to King Louis XVI. Today cloves are grown in the warm climates of Malaysia; Tanzania; the islands of Zanzibar, Pemba and Madagascar; and the West Indies, as well as the Moluccas.

Botanical illustration of Syzygium aromaticum from Koehler's Medicinal Plants.
Published before 1923 and public domain in the United States.

Cloves are the flower buds of an evergreen tree that grows to 30 feet high. Leaves are elliptic, dotted with glands, and fragrant when crushed. Flowers are yellow to white as buds, to ¼ inch across in terminal, sparsely flowered panicles. The buds are harvested by hand before the flowers open. Flowers grow at different rates, so a single tree can have multiple harvests in a season. The buds are sun dried, and sold whole, crushed into powder, or extracted as oil.