1st July: Cloves

1 July is Clove Day in the French Republican Calendar, which was created during the French revolution and used between 1792 and 1806. Here are 10 things you might not know about cloves.

1. Cloves are dried unopened flower buds of a tropical evergreen tree with the scientific name Syzygium aromaticum. The word "clove" comes from the Latin word Latin clavus, meaning nail, because the buds look like little nails.
2. The oldest cloves ever found were inside a ceramic vessel archaeologists found in Syria. They date back to 1700 BC.
3. They are native to the Maluku Islands (or Moluccas) in Indonesia. They grow best in coastal areas, and there's an old saying that cloves must see the sea to prosper. They may well have been discovered by early explorers because the aroma can drift far out to sea.
4. The chemical compound responsible for the distinctive smell of cloves is Eugenol.
5. In olden times, they were a luxury. Dante Alighieri mentions them in his Divina Commedia as something frivolous rich people in Siena use for roasting meat; and in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, cloves were worth at least their weight in Gold, because they were expensive to import.
6. The clove trade is mentioned in the One Thousand and One Nights stories. Sinbad the Sailor is said to have bought and sold cloves.
7. The oldest clove tree in the world is on Ternate, an island of the Moluccas, and is thought to be between 350 and 400 years old. The tree has a name - Afo. The story goes that a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre stole seedlings from this tree in 1770 and took them to Mauritius and Zanzibar, which became one of the world's largest producers of cloves.
8. Cloves have a number of medicinal uses. They were used in ancient China as breath fresheners. According to Chinese medicine, cloves are warming, and can be applied to the belly to cure digestive problems. In Indonesia, there is a brand of cigarettes containing cloves, called Kretek, from the word for the crackling sound of burning cloves. They were first made in the 19th century as a cure for asthma. Clove oil also well known as a cure for toothache - clove is a local anaesthetic. It's also said that clove paste mixed with a tiny bit of rock salt added to a glass of Milk is an effective headache cure.
9. They can also be used to repel insects such as ants or moths.
10. The Victorians added cloves to Oranges to make pomanders which could be given as gifts. Such a gift was said to represent warmth of feeling.

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