Reference point
A dried clove bud, snapped in two and smelled.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Warm, sweet, with a light numbing feeling on the tongue even before you taste it. It is thick and round, without edges.
Eugenol makes up as much as eighty percent, so clove is almost a single compound. That is why it is an ideal reference: once you recognise eugenol here, you will recognise it in cassia leaf, in holy basil, in many other essential oils.
The numbing comes from eugenol acting on the nerves, the same mechanism that led dentists to use clove oil for centuries.
How to smell it
Snap a dried clove bud in two and smell the break. Then crush a cassia leaf and smell it. What the two share is eugenol, and once you can separate it you will hear it everywhere.
Why this one is hard
It is not hard to recognise, but hard to hold back: clove is so strong that it saturates the nose within ten seconds and spoils every comparison after it. Always leave it for the end of the session.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Clove
Spicy family
Both contain eugenol. Clove is far more concentrated and numbs the tongue; cassia leaf is thinner and keeps a fresh-leaf note on top.
Scientific note
Clove contains eugenol at a very high share, sometimes above eighty percent — few species concentrate on a single compound to that degree. Eugenol has a local anaesthetic effect, which is why the tongue goes slightly numb when you taste it. It is one of the few cases where a physical sensation accompanying a smell can be traced to exactly one molecule.
In Vietnamese life
Clove is one of the spices that once sparked trade wars in Asia. In Vietnam it is an essential ingredient of pho and of many remedies, but almost all of it is imported.