Cloves
Also known as Syzygium aromaticum, clove, Nelken, clou de girofle, chiodi di garofano, clavo de olor, goździki
An unopened flower bud, and the most concentrated of the common charcuterie spices. Its eugenol dominates any blend it enters, which makes it the spice most often overdosed and the hardest error to correct.
A clove is a flower bud, picked before it opens and dried until it is hard and dark. The tree, Syzygium aromaticum, is native to the Moluccas, and cloves were among the spices that made the Banda and Molucca trade worth fighting European wars over. The dried bud is unusual in how much essential oil it carries, up to fifteen or twenty per cent of its weight, and that oil is overwhelmingly eugenol, the same phenol that gives allspice its character and that dentists have used as a topical anaesthetic. Anyone who has bitten a clove in a stew knows the numbing effect at first hand.
That concentration is the whole story of using cloves in charcuterie. They are used in the Spanish and Portuguese blood sausages, the morcillas and the boudins, in brawns and head cheeses, in cooked and pressed hams across northern Europe, in the Christmas and festival products, and in the sweet-spiced Chinese cured sausages. Almost everywhere they appear, they appear in fractions of a gram, and almost every failure with them is a failure of quantity rather than of judgement about whether to use them at all. A tenth of a gram per kilo too much and a sausage tastes of the dentist. Unlike an underseasoned mix, this cannot be corrected afterwards.
Eugenol brings real antimicrobial and antioxidant activity, more than most culinary spices, and clove oil is used as a preservative in some contexts. In a sausage, at the doses that taste acceptable, this is a marginal benefit and not a hurdle. It should never be reasoned about as one.
Whole cloves and ground cloves are used differently and the distinction matters. Whole cloves are for wet applications where they can be counted in and taken out: a brine, a simmered brawn, a stock, or studded into the surface of a ham for cooking. Ground cloves are for a farce, and because the ground spice both fades and clumps, weighing rather than measuring by spoon is the only reliable approach at these quantities. A level teaspoon of ground clove is around 2 g, which is already too much for most kilo batches.
Typical doses run from 0.05 to 0.3 g per kilo of meat. Where a traditional formula gives a figure that looks improbably small, it is very likely correct.