Whole Cloves

A clove is not a seed. It is a flower bud, picked before it opens and dried until it goes hard and dark brown, which is why it has that shape - a tapered stem with a small round head that is the unopened petals. Once you have seen it as a bud you cannot unsee it, and it explains why cloves behave the way they do in cooking.

They are the most concentrated spice in this entire range, and it is not close. Clove is roughly eighty to ninety per cent eugenol, a single compound doing almost all the work - warm, sweet, medicinal, and numbing on the tongue if you bite one whole. That numbing is real and is the same reason clove oil turns up in dentistry. Nothing else in a spice drawer is so dominated by one molecule, which is why clove tastes like itself and nothing else, and why it overwhelms a dish so easily.

The practical consequence is simple: use fewer than you think. One or two cloves are enough to scent a family-sized pot of rice. Four make the rice taste of clove. Eight make it inedible. Cooks who have been burned by this once tend to under-use cloves forever afterwards, which is its own kind of mistake - the spice is genuinely excellent when the quantity is right.

In Egypt cloves go into the pot with slow-cooked meat, into the stock for fattah, into mahshi, and into the whole-spice mix that perfumes rice. They are pressed into onions for stock in kitchens all over the Mediterranean. They belong in the spiced tea and coffee traditions across the region, and in the winter drinks of half of Europe - mulled wine, spiced cider, and the clove-studded orange that has been a Christmas decoration for centuries.

Outside the savoury kitchen they carry an enormous amount of baking. Clove is in gingerbread, in speculaas, in pumpkin spice, in Christmas cake and in most mixed-spice blends. It is also in garam masala, in Chinese five-spice, in Ethiopian berbere, and in the pickling spice used for everything from herring to torshi. Very few spices span sweet and savoury this comfortably.

Cloves are not Egyptian and never have been. They come from the Maluku Islands in Indonesia, the original Spice Islands, and for a long stretch of history they grew nowhere else on earth. That single fact shaped a startling amount of world history: the Portuguese and then the Dutch fought to control the trade, the Dutch went as far as destroying clove trees outside the islands they held, and the plants were eventually smuggled out and established elsewhere. The clove in your kitchen is the direct descendant of one of the most contested commodities that has ever existed.

Buy them whole. Ground clove loses its top notes within weeks and what remains is the flat medicinal base, which is exactly the part people say they dislike. Whole buds keep their oil sealed in and grind in seconds when you want powder. Good ones are plump rather than shrivelled, still slightly oily, and leave a scent on your fingers when you rub one.

In Egypt a clove or two is often added to tea in cold weather, and that is offered here as a description of the custom rather than as a health claim, and it is not medical advice.