Cloves are the dried, unopened flower buds of Syzygium aromaticum, an evergreen tree native exclusively to the small volcanic islands of northern Maluku in what is now eastern Indonesia (specifically Ternate, Tidore, Bacan, Makian, and Moti, a cluster of islands so geographically remote that they were known to the ancient world only as a rumour, the source of a spice so valuable that wars were fought for centuries over the right to trade it. The clove tree grows only in humid tropical conditions at relatively low elevations and was cultivated on these islands for millennia before any outside civilisation knew of its existence. The harvest is the dried, unopened flower bud) picked by hand before it opens, sun-dried until it turns from green to dark brown. In this form it contains one of the highest concentrations of volatile aromatic compounds of any spice: the primary compound, eugenol, constitutes seventy to ninety percent of the clove's essential oil and is so potent that a single clove dropped into a pot of simmering water will perfume the entire kitchen within minutes. The clove's pungency is so extreme that medieval European physicians administered it neat for toothache (eugenol remains the active ingredient in dental anaesthetic to this day. In Maluku, cloves are not merely a crop but a living tradition: trees were planted at the birth of a child, their growth entwined with that of the person born under them, and the oldest known clove trees) survivors of the Dutch VOC's mass burning campaigns of the seventeenth century: are estimated to be more than three hundred years old.
The clove's journey from Maluku to the world is among the most consequential stories in the history of food, trade, and empire. Archaeological evidence from the ancient Syrian city of Mari has placed cloves in the Levant by approximately 1700 BCE, when the Maluku Islands were entirely unknown to the Mediterranean world, testimony to the extraordinary reach of the prehistoric Indian Ocean trade network that passed the spice from hand to hand across thousands of miles before it could be named or its source located. By the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), cloves had reached China, where courtiers were required to hold one in the mouth before addressing the emperor, the first documented use of a breath freshener in history. Arab traders working the monsoon winds dominated the clove trade for nearly a millennium from around 800 CE, carrying the spice to Baghdad, the Levant, and through overland routes to Europe, where a pound of cloves could buy a farm. The Portuguese arrival in the Maluku Islands in 1511–1512, following Vasco da Gama's opening of the sea route around Africa, broke the Arab monopoly and delivered direct access to the Spice Islands to Lisbon (a disruption so profitable that it financed the entire Portuguese Empire for a generation. The Dutch VOC seized Maluku from the Portuguese in 1605 and pursued the most ruthless monopoly in colonial history: burning clove trees on any island not under direct VOC control, slaughtering populations who traded independently, and maintaining prices that made cloves worth more by weight than gold in Amsterdam's markets. The monopoly was broken in 1770 by the French botanist Pierre Poivre) Peter Pepper, as English historians have sometimes rendered his name, who smuggled clove seedlings to Mauritius and Réunion, from which they eventually reached Zanzibar in 1812. With Zanzibar's volcanic soil and tropical climate, the world's centre of clove production shifted decisively from the Spice Islands to the East African coast, where it remains to this day.
Indonesia remains the world's largest consumer of cloves, not primarily in cooking but in the kretek cigarette, a clove-and-tobacco blend smoked by a large proportion of Indonesian men, which constitutes the single largest use of cloves in the world by volume. In cuisine, cloves flavour an extraordinary range of preparations across every inhabited continent: the Christmas spice blends of northern Europe (mulled wine, Christmas pudding, speculaas, stollen, pfeffernüsse), the garam masalas and biryani of India, the baharat blends of the Arab world, the Yemeni hawaij, the Oaxacan mole negro, and the everyday cooking of the Zanzibar and Maluku islands where they originate. Zanzibar and Indonesia together produce the majority of the world's commercial clove supply. The eugenol extracted from cloves is used in dentistry, perfumery, food flavouring, and as a natural insect repellent, one of the most commercially significant essential oils derived from any spice. In Maluku, the clove remains a cultural and spiritual plant, its history inseparable from the colonial violence that made the Spice Islands the most fought-over geography in the history of the global spice trade, and its cultivation today a quiet assertion of an identity that endured.
Historical Journey of Cloves
Ternate & Tidore, Maluku Islands, Indonesia — c. 1000 BCE
The five small volcanic islands of northern Maluku (Ternate, Tidore, Bacan, Makian, and Moti) are the only place on earth where Syzygium aromaticum, the clove tree, grows wild. On these islands, which rise sharply from the sea in perfect cone shapes that mirror the shape of the clove bud itself, the tree was cultivated for centuries before any outside civilisation knew of its existence. The earliest material evidence of the clove in the wider world (the discovery of a ceramic vessel containing dried cloves in the ancient Syrian city of Mari, dated to approximately 1700 BCE) tells us that the trade routes that carried the clove from Maluku to the Levant were already functioning more than three thousand years ago, moving the spice through a chain of intermediaries so long that no single trader along it could have known its ultimate origin or destination. The Maluku islanders who harvested those first cloves (climbing the trees to pick the flower buds before they opened, spreading them on palm mats to dry in the equatorial sun until they darkened from green to the colour of old wood) were at the beginning of a commercial chain that would eventually reach every kitchen in the world. They planted clove trees at the birth of each child, and the tree's health was the child's health. The clove was not merely trade; it was kinship, ceremony, and identity.
- Nasi Kuning: Indonesian sacred yellow rice cooked in coconut milk with cloves and lemongrass
Kozhikode (Calicut), Kerala, India — c. 300 BCE
The Malabar Coast of Kerala was the western terminus of the monsoon trade route that brought Maluku's spices across the Indian Ocean, and Kozhikode (known to Arab traders as Calicut and later to Europeans as the destination that justified Vasco da Gama's entire voyage) was the greatest spice market on that coast. Cloves arrived in Kerala at least as early as the third century BCE, documented in Sangam Tamil literature as kirambu and in early Sanskrit texts as lavanga, where the Ayurvedic medical tradition assigned them properties of warmth, digestive stimulation, and respiratory benefit. The Charaka Samhita, one of the foundational texts of Ayurvedic medicine, recommends lavanga in preparations for coughs, digestive complaints, and fevers (a use pattern that ancient medical traditions from Rome to China would replicate independently.
The cloves that arrived in Kozhikode entered a culinary tradition already defined by the sea and the spice garden. The Mappila community) Kerala's Muslim population, descended from Arab traders who had settled on the Malabar coast over centuries and married into local families (developed a distinct cuisine that fused Kerala's native ingredient abundance with the Arab culinary vocabulary they brought with them. The Thalassery biryani that emerged from this Mappila kitchen is among the oldest surviving regional biryanis in India: made with khyma rice, a short-grained, intensely aromatic local variety, with generous whole cloves worked into the ghee base, and the meat and rice cooked separately before layering and sealing for dum. It is a biryani of the coast) lighter, more fragrant, and more directly connected to the clove trade than its Mughal descendants to the north.
Kerala's ancient Syrian Christian community (the Nasrani, who trace their origin to the apostle Thomas) contributed the Kerala coconut stew (istu): a pale, delicate braise in fresh coconut milk with whole cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, and peppercorns, eaten with appam. The istu's whiteness (its spice warmth coming entirely from the whole spices floating in the coconut milk, untouched by chilli) is the Kerala kitchen's most elegant demonstration of what cloves do when they are not the loudest voice in the room.
- Thalassery Biryani: Malabar Mappila biryani with khyma rice, whole cloves and fried onions
- Kerala Coconut Stew: Nasrani chicken istu in coconut milk with whole cloves and cardamom
- Tulsi Kadha
Alexandria & Rome, Roman Empire — c. 100 CE
Cloves appear in Roman sources from the first century CE, Pliny the Elder mentions them in his Naturalis Historia as a spice from India, noting their similarity in appearance to the grain of pepper, their considerable price, and their use as a breath freshener, which the Romans (like the Chinese) had recognised. They reached Rome via the Arab-Nabataean trade routes through the Red Sea and Alexandria, travelling in sealed amphorae as part of the luxury spice cargo that Pliny famously complained was draining Rome's gold reserves eastward at a rate of one hundred million sesterces per year. The Roman kitchen, as documented by Apicius in De Re Coquinaria, used cloves in spiced wines (conditum paradoxum), in meat preparations, and in the complex spice pastes that flavoured the sauces of the Roman elite. The conditum paradoxum, the remarkable spiced wine of the Roman table: combined cloves with honey, pepper, bay, saffron, and mastic into a preparation that serves as both a historical document and a recipe: the oldest surviving record of the clove in a specifically culinary Western context, and a drink that still tastes remarkable when made today.
- Conditum Paradoxum: Roman spiced honey wine with cloves and mastic, from the kitchen of Apicius
Chang'an (Xi'an), Tang Dynasty China — c. 600 CE
The Chinese record of cloves is among the oldest outside the spice's Maluku homeland. Han Dynasty texts document that courtiers were required to hold a clove (jīdīxiāng (chicken-tongue spice, named for the shape) in the mouth before approaching the emperor to address him) the first formally documented use of a breath freshener in human history. By the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), cloves had become a luxury spice of the imperial kitchen, available in the great markets of Chang'an where Arab, Persian, Indian, and Central Asian merchants converged. Chinese medical tradition, following the same Ayurvedic logic that had classified cloves in India, assigned them properties of warming the middle-burner, relieving nausea, and treating stomach cold, and traditional Chinese medicine continues to use them today. In the Tang and subsequent Song Dynasty kitchens, cloves found their most enduring Chinese culinary expression: as one of the five spices of wu xiang fen, the five-spice blend of star anise, cinnamon, fennel, cloves, and Sichuan pepper that defines the aromatic logic of Chinese braised and roasted preparations. Wu xiang fen is to Chinese cooking what garam masala is to Indian cooking: the finishing spice blend that speaks of a culture's relationship with the spice trade, compressed into a teaspoon.
- Wu Xiang Fen: Chinese five-spice powder with cloves, star anise, cinnamon and Sichuan pepper
Baghdad, Abbasid Caliphate — c. 900 CE
The Abbasid Caliphate, at the height of its power in the ninth and tenth centuries, made Baghdad the intellectual and gastronomic capital of the known world, and the Arab merchants who supplied its markets with spices from the Indian Ocean were the dominant figures in the clove trade. Arab dhows, working the monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean, carried cloves from Maluku to the Malabar Coast of India, then onwards to the Persian Gulf and up the Tigris to Baghdad, where they entered the culinary traditions of the most sophisticated food culture in the medieval world. The great tenth-century cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, compiled by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, documents dozens of preparations using cloves (in the complex spice pastes of the Abbasid court, in the spiced meats, and in the baharat spice blend that remains the foundation of Gulf cooking to this day. The Yemeni hawaij) a blend of black pepper, cumin, turmeric, and cloves used in coffee and in the spiced meat preparations of the Arabian Peninsula: descends from this same Arab spice tradition, and carries the same clove note that defined the Abbasid kitchen. From Baghdad, the spice trade spread westward through the Levant to the Mediterranean, and southward along the East African coast where Arab traders established the settlement patterns that would eventually produce Swahili culture and the Zanzibar spice economy.
- Kabsa: Saudi slow-cooked chicken and rice with cloves, black lime and cardamom
- Hawaij: Yemeni spice blend with cloves, black pepper, cumin and turmeric
Malacca, Malacca Sultanate — c. 1350 CE
The Malacca Sultanate, founded around 1400 CE on the southwestern coast of the Malay Peninsula, became the most important spice entrepot in the world in the fifteenth century: a port through which virtually all the cloves, nutmeg, and pepper of the Indonesian archipelago passed on their way to India, Arabia, China, and eventually Europe. The Portuguese historian Tomé Pires estimated that eighty-four languages were spoken in Malacca at the height of its trade (a linguistic diversity that reflected the extraordinary commercial reach of the port. Arab, Indian, Chinese, Javanese, and Malay merchants all had permanent communities in Malacca, and the cuisine that developed there) what would eventually become the Peranakan (Nyonya-Baba) tradition of the Chinese-Malay hybrid community (folded cloves into every spice preparation as a matter of course. The Peranakan kitchen at Malacca, which blended Chinese culinary structure with the aromatics of the Malay archipelago, produced ayam pongteh) a braised chicken dish with fermented soybean paste and whole cloves: as one of its signature preparations. When the Portuguese seized Malacca in 1511, they captured not just a port but the entire architecture of the Indian Ocean spice trade: the knowledge of where the cloves came from, who controlled them, and the sea routes that led directly to the Spice Islands.
- Ayam Pongteh: Nyonya Peranakan braised chicken with fermented soybean paste and whole cloves
Lisbon, Portugal — c. 1511 CE
The Portuguese capture of Malacca in 1511 and the subsequent establishment of direct sea trade with the Maluku Islands transformed Lisbon into the spice capital of Europe almost overnight. By 1515, Portuguese ships were returning from the East loaded with cloves, nutmeg, pepper, and cinnamon, selling them directly to European buyers and bypassing the Arab-Venetian intermediary trade that had controlled the spice routes for centuries. The wealth that poured into Lisbon produced the extraordinary Manueline architecture (the carved stone of the Jerónimos Monastery, its nautical motifs and twisted columns encrusted with the ropes and armillary spheres of the sea voyages that made Portugal briefly the richest nation in Europe. And the spices entered the Portuguese kitchen with the directness and enthusiasm of a culture that now had them in abundance. The caldeirada de peixe) the layered fish stew of the Atlantic coast: absorbed whole cloves into its aromatic base as an everyday ingredient within a generation of the Maluku trade opening. Cloves appeared in the Christmas spiced breads (broa de mel) and the Madeiran molasses cakes (bolo de mel) that the Portuguese carried to their Atlantic island colonies. The colonial trade did not merely enrich Portugal economically; it permanently altered what Portugal ate.
- Caldeirada de Peixe: Portuguese layered fish stew with cloves, white wine and bay
Agra & Delhi, Mughal Empire, India — c. 1560 CE
The Mughal Empire at the height of its power under Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605) created one of the most sophisticated culinary traditions in the world. The Mughals were of Timurid-Chagatai Turk origin, and their culinary inheritance came from the Persian and Central Asian courts in which their ancestors had been formed (a tradition of slow-cooked meat preparations, aromatic rice dishes, and the elevated use of whole spices that the Persian kitchen had developed over a millennium. When this tradition encountered the spice abundance of the Indian subcontinent) cloves arriving via the Malabar Coast from Maluku, cardamom from the Western Ghats, pepper from the same coast that had fed Rome and Arabia (the result was the North Indian culinary tradition as we know it today.
Garam masala) from Hindi garam (warming) and masala (spice mixture) (was codified in the royal kitchens of Agra and Delhi as the finishing technique that distinguished the sophisticated preparation from the merely competent one. Whole cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, black pepper, and mace were toasted over a dry tawa and ground fresh, then added at the very end of cooking in small quantities, their volatile compounds released directly into the finished dish rather than cooked away. The Ain-i-Akbari, Akbar's administrative encyclopaedia compiled by his minister Abul Fazl in 1590, documents the imperial kitchen's spice usage in extraordinary detail, and the clove is prominent throughout. The Mughal court also developed the tradition of spiced hot beverages) qahwa, spiced infusions of cloves, cardamom, and ginger in hot water: from which masala chai eventually descended after the British introduction of Assam black tea in the nineteenth century transformed the elite spiced drink into the street-corner institution consumed in billions of cups across India every day.
- Garam Masala: North Indian warming spice blend with cloves, cardamom, cinnamon and mace
- Masala Chai: Mughal-descended spiced milk tea with cloves, cardamom, ginger and black pepper
- Zafrani Pulao: Kashmiri saffron and clove rice pilaf from the Mughal court
Mexico City & Oaxaca, New Spain — c. 1570 CE
The Spanish colonial empire in the Americas inherited the Portuguese relationship with the Maluku spice trade through the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), by which Spain ceded its claim to the Spice Islands to Portugal in exchange for a financial payment (taking the cloves they had bought in the form of a cash settlement rather than a geographical claim. Spanish merchants and the colonial church introduced cloves to New Spain from the 1550s onwards through the Manila Galleon trade, which connected Acapulco on the Pacific coast of Mexico to the Philippines, and through which the spices of the East Indies flowed westward into the Americas. In the Dominican convents of Oaxaca) the centres of sophisticated colonial cuisine where the nuns developed the great mole sauces by fusing Spanish spice imports with the existing Aztec chilli tradition (cloves found their most spectacular New World application. The mole negro of Oaxaca uses six to eight whole cloves as one of its twenty-plus ingredients, their warmth and sweet spice amplifying the bitterness of the charred chilli and the darkness of the chocolate in a sauce of extraordinary complexity. The Oaxacan cooks who developed mole negro in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were working at the intersection of the Aztec spice vocabulary, the Spanish colonial pantry, and the Indian Ocean trade routes) a confluence so improbable that it produced one of the most complex flavours in the world.
- Mole Negro: Oaxacan black mole with mulato chillies, dark chocolate and cloves
Hyderabad, Deccan Sultanate, India — c. 1591 CE
The city of Hyderabad was founded in 1591 by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, fifth sultan of the Qutb Shahi dynasty that ruled the Deccan from the fortress of Golconda. It was planned from its inception as a great city (a conscious act of cultural ambition) and the court that developed around it produced one of the most refined culinary traditions in the subcontinent. The Qutb Shahi sultans, of Turkic and Persian origin, brought with them a culinary vocabulary steeped in the Persian and Central Asian cooking of the Timurid courts: rice preparations, slow-cooked meats, aromatic spice blends, and the dum technique (sealing a pot with dough and cooking over very low heat so that the food steams in its own fragrant vapour) that became the defining method of the Hyderabadi kitchen.
The biryani that developed in Hyderabad was distinct from both the Malabar biryani of Kerala and the Mughal preparations of Delhi. The Hyderabadi method (kacchi biryani, meaning raw biryani) layers raw marinated meat directly with parboiled rice before sealing, requiring precise judgement of timing so that the meat cooks through at the same moment the rice finishes. It is considered the most technically demanding of all biryani traditions. Whole cloves are used at two points: in the initial marinade for the meat, and in the cooking water for the rice, their warmth providing the bass note under the saffron, deep-fried onions, and kewra water that give Hyderabadi biryani its unmistakable aromatic signature. When the Asaf Jah dynasty established the Hyderabad Nizamate in 1724, the biryani tradition was already fully formed; the Nizams refined it further and made Hyderabad the city most indelibly associated with biryani in the world.
- Hyderabadi Dum Biryani: kacchi-style layered rice with marinated chicken and whole cloves
Amsterdam, Dutch Republic — c. 1605 CE
The Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) seized the Maluku Islands from the Portuguese in 1605 and immediately established the most ruthless commodity monopoly in commercial history. The VOC's clove monopoly operated on a simple principle: control the supply at source, and you control the price everywhere. VOC officers burned clove trees on any island not under direct company control; the Banda Islands massacre of 1621, in which the VOC killed or enslaved almost the entire population of the Banda archipelago for trading nutmeg independently, demonstrated that the company regarded the spice islands as assets to be exploited without mercy. The monopoly succeeded spectacularly: for most of the seventeenth century, cloves sold in Amsterdam for sixty times their purchase price in Maluku. The wealth that flowed into Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age (the Rembrandt paintings, the canal houses, the great merchant palaces) was built partly on the profits of the Maluku spice monopoly. And the cloves, now flooding into Amsterdam markets at controlled prices, entered the Dutch kitchen as an everyday spice. The speculaas biscuits of the Dutch Christmas tradition (the windmill-stamped spiced shortbread that the Dutch eat on Sinterklaasavond) were made possible by the VOC's success in making spices cheap enough for a baker to put into a biscuit.
- Speculaas: Dutch spiced shortbread with cloves, cinnamon and cardamom
- Cloved Ham: Christmas gammon studded with whole cloves and glazed with honey and mustard
Port Louis, Mauritius — c. 1770 CE
Pierre Poivre (Peter Pepper, a name so perfectly appropriate that historians have suspected it might be apocryphal) was a French colonial administrator and botanist who spent most of his career trying to break the Dutch clove monopoly. In 1770, after more than a decade of attempts, he succeeded: a French naval expedition under his direction reached the Maluku Islands and returned to Mauritius with sixty-one viable clove plants and four hundred nutmeg plants, the first clove seedlings to leave the Dutch-controlled Spice Islands since the VOC monopoly began. The clove trees planted in Mauritius from those seedlings grew, propagated, and by 1790 the island had a functioning clove industry. More importantly, seedlings from Mauritius were carried to Réunion, to Cayenne in French Guiana, and eventually (in 1812) to Zanzibar, where the Omani Sultan Seyyid Said planted them in such quantities that Zanzibar would become the world's largest clove producer within fifty years. Pierre Poivre's single act of botanical espionage ended a century of Dutch monopoly control and set in motion a redistribution of the global spice trade whose effects persist to this day. The cari poulet mauricien (Mauritius's characteristic chicken curry, fragrant with whole cloves and fresh thyme) is a daily reminder of the island's own place in the clove story.
- Cari Poulet Mauricien: Mauritian chicken curry with whole cloves, curry leaves and fresh thyme
London & the English shires, Britain — c. 1800 CE
Britain's relationship with cloves was built on the same foundation as the Dutch: colonial trade and the cheap availability of a formerly expensive spice. British merchants had competed with the Dutch for the spice trade since the early seventeenth century (the English East India Company was founded in 1600, one year before the Dutch VOC) and while they never achieved the Dutch level of control over the Maluku supply, the democratisation of spice prices that followed the breaking of the Dutch monopoly in the late eighteenth century made cloves available to British households at prices that transformed them from a luxury to a staple. The British Christmas cooking tradition that consolidated in the Victorian period made cloves essential to the seasonal kitchen: in the Christmas pudding, where ground cloves are part of the mixed spice blend that perfumes the dark, steamed fruit cake; in the mulled wine (negus, bishop) that warmed the Victorian parlour; in the cloved orange pomanders hung in wardrobes and linen cupboards; and most visibly in the Christmas ham studded with whole cloves at every diamond of the scored fat, glazed with honey and sugar until it lacquers to a deep mahogany. The cloved ham is one of the most direct visual records of the spice trade in British domestic life: a piece of meat from a British pig, studded with the dried flower buds of a tree that grows only on five small islands in the eastern Indonesian Sea, on a table in a country that did not know those islands existed five hundred years ago.
- Mulled Wine: European Christmas spiced red wine with whole cloves, cinnamon and orange
- Christmas Pudding: British steamed dark fruit pudding with cloves, mixed spice and brandy
- Watermelon rind pickle
Zanzibar Town (Stone Town), Tanzania — c. 1812 CE
The Omani Sultan Seyyid Said planted the first clove trees in Zanzibar in 1812, using seedlings that had been carried from Mauritius following Pierre Poivre's smuggling mission forty years earlier. The volcanic red soil and warm humid climate of the island proved extraordinary for clove cultivation, and within a generation Zanzibar had become the world's dominant clove producer (supplying by the 1850s roughly three-quarters of the world's entire clove output from plantations that spread across the island in a green and fragrant canopy whose scent reached visiting ships miles offshore. The Sultan relocated his entire court from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840, making it the capital of the Omani maritime empire, and the island became the trading hub of the western Indian Ocean, through which cloves, ivory, and) in the darkest chapter of the island's history (enslaved people from the East African interior were traded. The Arabic, Indian, Persian, and African cultures that converged in Stone Town produced a Swahili cuisine of extraordinary complexity: the pilau rice of the Zanzibar table, the biryani brought by Indian traders, the spiced tea sold in the street stalls of Stone Town, and the clove-scented air that was the island's most pervasive sensory fact. Zanzibar's clove trees still produce a significant proportion of the world's supply, and the harvest) still picked by hand, still dried on palm mats in the equatorial sun: remains continuous with the practice that began on Ternate and Tidore three thousand years before.
- Zanzibar Clove Tea: Swahili spiced tea with whole cloves, cardamom and fresh ginger
- Pilau wa Zanzibar: Swahili spiced rice with whole cloves and pilau masala
- East African Pilau: slow-cooked spiced rice with whole cloves and caramelised onion
- Wali wa Nazi: Kenyan coconut rice with whole cloves and cardamom from the Swahili coast
Dutch East Indies, Batavia (Java) — c. 1890 CE
There is a full-circle quality to the presence of cloves in lapis legit. The cloves in the spekkoek spice blend of this Dutch-Javanese layered cake originate just east of Java (from Ternate and Tidore in the Maluku Islands, the very spice islands that the VOC had seized, fortified, and depopulated to establish its clove monopoly. The same trade routes that carried cloves to Amsterdam) making Dutch merchants rich, funding the Golden Age, and giving Dutch pastry kitchens access to a spice once reserved for medieval royalty: carried those cloves back east again, into the colonial households of Batavia where they were ground into celebration cake batter alongside nutmeg from the Banda Islands and cinnamon from Sumatran forests. The clove had always grown in this archipelago. The Dutch colonial kitchen simply found a new use for it, a few islands over from where the tree had always stood.
- Lapis Legit (Dutch East Indies spiced layer cake)
