Well. They come from many places now. But in the beginning, they came only from the Moluccas, the mysterious Spice Islands, a spattering of tiny volcanic islets which spawned unimaginable riches for their rulers and sparked the European powers’ race to the East.

It’s harvest time on Pulau Ternate, once the heart of an empire that stretched as far as Papua, Sulawesi and Mindanao in the Philippines, now just one more tiny volcanic peak breaking out of the Maluku Sea. So we jumped a bike up the slopes of the Gamalama volcano at the core of the island to see the cloves being harvested near the village of Air Tege Tege.

Every village in the island, right now, is lined with cloves sun-drying on tarpaulin and thick with the piney-nutmeg-myrrh aroma of cloves. Combined with the colours of the little houses, the intense heat of the equatorial sun and the occasional waft of frangipani flowers and nutmeg, fresh and shiny in their little drying baskets, it’s an incredible sensory experience.

And the cloves? Well, they, like capers, are the bud of a plant — a tree, in fact, which can grow to fifty feet or more in size, and live for hundreds of years, its leaves still holding that rich tingly scent of cloves. This is how they look before they ripen.

So next time I mull wine, use tiger balm or read up recipes, I’ll remember these innocent-seeming scarlet buds, and think back to the Spice Islands, where it all began. Thanks to Beth at Wanderlust and Lipstick for hosting Wanderfood Wednesdays.

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