Cengkeh

Eugenia aromatica. Cloves. Originally they grew only on a few islands in the Moluccas, in eastern Indonesia; the Portuguese started to plant the trees more widely, but when the Dutch took over they reversed this policy and it was not until the late eighteenth century that large numbers of seedlings were transplanted to Malaya, Mauritius, Zanzibar and South America. But trade in cloves was well developed centuries before Europeans ever came to the South China Sea. They were in demand, not only as spices, but as medicine and for sweetening the breath. For much of Chinese history, it was highly inadvisable to appear before the Emperor without a clove or two in your mouth. The Javanese mix cloves with tobacco to make kretek cigarettes; for anyone who has lived in Java, the smell of burning cloves must be one of the most nostalgic and evocative of all. The word kretek (with short, ‘grunted’ e’s instead of the full e’s of the cigarettes), is however, quite a common onomatopoeic Javanese word to describe anything that crackles, creaks or splutters, which the fragments of clove embedded in a burning cigarette certainly do.