A Guide to Spice, part 1: Cloves

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2012

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sheila Dillon embarks on a journey through the world of spice, starting with the clove. She follows the story of the clove from a harvest in Africa to sauce making with chef Jeremy Lee.

A culinary prize since the 3rd century BC, cloves have been a source of conflict and competition for centuries. They're still one of the most popular spices in our kitchen cupboards.

Reporter Nick Maes travels to Zanzibar, one of the world's leading producers of cloves, to find out how the dried, unopened flower buds are grown and then processed. He hears how years of decline have been reversed and plantations extended.

Along with Jeremy Lee, Niki Segnit, author of The Flavour Thesaurus, provides a helpful guide to flavour combinations and the uses of cloves in cooking.

Transcript

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1:00.4	Over the next three weeks we're going to tell the spice story updating a history
1:04.7	that's alluring, violent, romantic and intimately tied to the beginnings of
1:09.5	global capitalism. The quest for spices and the whole beginnings of the
1:14.4	spice wars began for England at least it began in the Elizabethan period
1:18.8	when these swashbuckling merchant adventurers started sailing off around the world in search of these
1:26.4	exotic and extremely precious substances.
1:29.6	Precious substances that were quickly absorbed into the way we at.
1:33.8	We forget today we have such an amazing access to such a plethora of ingredients and
1:39.0	imagine here so much of the world continued for many many years on the most basic ingredients, you know,
	...

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