Clove

Where it comes from

Cloves are the dried, unopened flower buds of Syzygium aromaticum, an evergreen of the myrtle family thought to be indigenous to the Moluccas, the Spice Islands of eastern Indonesia^1,2. The tree grows to 8–12 m, flowers from about its fifth year, and can yield up to 34 kg of dried buds a year; the buds are picked by hand and dried in the sun¹. On Zanzibar the harvest runs through September, October and November: pickers climb trees up to 15 m tall for clusters of ten to fifteen buds, spread them on mats, and watch them lose about two-thirds of their weight as they dry³. The English name is the Latin clavus, a nail, after the shape; the Swahili karafuu came through Arabic from the Greek^2,3.

How it travelled

The earliest written references are Chinese: under the Han dynasty, courtiers held cloves in the mouth to sweeten their breath before the emperor^1,3. By the tenth to twelfth centuries cloves were passing through Mantai, the ancient port on Sri Lanka, which bought them from south-east Asia and sold them on to India, Arabia and the Mediterranean¹. From 1403 the port of Melaka drew merchants carrying cloves by the tonne from the Malukus, 3,000 km to the east³.

The Portuguese found the source in the sixteenth century and held the trade for nearly a century; the Dutch then took it over and confined cultivation to the islands of Ambon and Ternate to keep cloves scarce and dear¹. In 1770 the French broke the monopoly. Pierre Poivre had seeds smuggled out, traced to a tree on Ternate that lived more than four hundred years, and the seedlings, raised on the Île de France (Mauritius) and the Île Bourbon (Réunion), went on to the Seychelles, Madagascar and Zanzibar^1,3.

How cloves reached Zanzibar is popularly attributed to an Arab named Harmali bin Saleh, who brought them from Réunion in 1812 and set up plantations, only to have them confiscated by Said bin Sultan of Muscat and Oman³. Said first visited Zanzibar in 1828 and acquired clove-growing estates, turning Zanzibar and Pemba into major producers; in 1840 he moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar because his East African revenues had overtaken Oman’s⁴. The plantations ran on enslaved labour and Indian finance: the slave trade remained “an essential part of the economy” even under British pressure to end it, and Indian migrants who financed the caravans “got involved in clove plantations”⁴. By the end of the nineteenth century nine-tenths of the world’s cloves grew on the two islands³. After the revolution of 1964 the plantations were nationalised, output fell and never recovered, and the islands turned to tourism³.

Today

Indonesia is by far the largest producer and also the largest consumer. By one account it grows about 112,000 tonnes a year, four-fifths of the world’s cloves, nine-tenths of them going into kretek cigarettes, which blend tobacco with ground cloves³; a 2023 ranking from FAO data gives it 133,955 tonnes, about 62%⁵. Madagascar is the second producer and the largest exporter⁶, with an average of 24,419 tonnes a year over 2020–2024 from more than 70,000 ha and 18,000 farmers on the east coast; cloves are its second agricultural export after vanilla⁷. Tanzania produced about 8,580 tonnes a year over the same period, mostly on Unguja and Pemba, and the Comoros 7,308⁷. Zanzibar’s own crop is around 5,550 tonnes³.

With apples

In Europe and North America cloves season winter fare: wassail, the spiced ale or cider that often has apples in it, and mincemeat, which traditionally contains them¹. They go into stewed fruit and pies². The spice is strong, and a few buds go a long way.

Recipe

Apples poached with clove and orange, for four.

1. Peel, halve and core four apples that hold their shape.
2. In a wide pan bring 500 ml of apple juice, the juice and two strips of peel of an orange, two tablespoons of sugar and six whole cloves to a simmer.
3. Lower in the apples, cut side down, and cover them with a disc of baking paper.
4. Simmer gently for 10 to 15 minutes, turning once, until a skewer meets no resistance.
5. Lift the apples out and boil the liquid hard until it is syrupy, about five minutes.
6. Fish out the cloves and peel, pour the syrup over the apples and let them cool a little.
7. Serve warm with thick yoghurt, or cold for breakfast.

Notes

• Dried cloves are built for travel: a kilogram can hold up to 10,000 buds³.
• In Indonesian baking, the pineapple-filled kue nastar biscuits are each finished with a single whole clove³.
• Sri Lanka’s Mantai traders were handling cloves in the tenth to twelfth centuries, long before Europeans reached the Moluccas¹.

Where the sources disagree

• Indonesia’s crop. One account gives about 112,000 tonnes and 80% of the world³; the 2023 ranking gives 133,955 tonnes and 62%⁵. Both are given.
• Who brought cloves to Zanzibar. The 1812 planting by Harmali bin Saleh is described by its source as “popularly attributed”³; another guide spells the name Saleh bin Haramil al Abray.
• “Nine-tenths of the world’s cloves” at the end of the nineteenth century is a journalist’s figure³, not checked against a primary source.