
Cloves Whole
From garam masala to mulled wine, baked ham to apple pie, Chinese five-spice to Arabian baharat, cloves are used in almost every cuisine. Their pungent, warming, peppery sweetness is so well-liked that they are used for their fragrance alone in studded oranges (originally used to ward off the plague) and Indonesian cigarettes. They are the dried flower buds of a tropical tree native to the Mollucas in the South China Sea. Medicinally, they are antiseptic, and clove oil is a traditional and effective remedy for toothache.