Victorian Cloves: What Mrs Beeton Really Cooked

Picture a Victorian Christmas and cloves are probably in it somewhere: studded oranges on the mantel, spice garlands, a haze of warm scent through the parlour. It is a lovely picture. The surviving household advice paints a different one, in which cloves spent the season mostly in the kitchen, doing quiet work in the pot.

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The best witness we could open

Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in parts between 1859 and 1861, was written to run a middle-class home, which makes it a good record of what such a household was told to cook and keep. Searching it for cloves turns up a very consistent habit. Cooks stick an onion with cloves and drop it into stock, soups and sauces, where the spice melts into the background and gets fished out before serving. They push a single clove into the core of each apple before wrapping it in rice for apple snowballs. And in winter they mull wine.

You can almost smell that kitchen. Picture a coal range, a heavy stockpot with a lid, and a cook sticking cloves into an onion with a quick, practiced press. There is a pleasing economy in it. One onion, three or four cloves, and an hour of simmering gives a whole pot of stock its quiet backbone of warmth.

That recipe is lovely in its plainness. Boil the spice in water until the flavour comes out, add the wine and sugar, bring it to the boil, and serve with crisp toast or biscuits. The spices usually used, says the book, are cloves, grated nutmeg, and cinnamon or mace, with port and claret the wines of choice. If you want a documented Victorian clove moment, that is it, and it is as good today as it was then.

The pudding without cloves

Here is the surprise. Beeton's "Christmas plum-pudding, very good" lists raisins, currants, mixed peel, breadcrumbs, suet, eggs and brandy, and no cloves. Her mincemeat leans on raisins, currants, beef, suet, citron, peel, apples, lemon, brandy and a small nutmeg, again without cloves. These are two recipes in a book that gives variations, and households did their own thing, so we would not turn it into a rule. It is still a nice corrective to the idea that every Victorian Christmas dish was heavy with clove.

What hung on the walls

For decoration, the book reaches for holly. A sprig goes in the middle of the Christmas pudding, a little brandy is poured round and lit at the table, and a recipe numbered 1545 shows how to frost holly leaves for garnishing dessert and supper dishes. A clove garland or spice swag does not appear, and the word "pomander" does not turn up in the text at all.

The nearest thing is a short entry headed "Orange and cloves." Beeton says it appears to have been the custom formerly in England to give oranges stuck full with cloves as new year's presents, and quotes Ben Jonson's Christmas Masque: "He has an orange and rosemary, but not a clove to stick in it." Notice the word "formerly." By her day the practice was one she described as past, and Jonson belongs to the early seventeenth century. The studded orange is older than Victoria, something Victorians read about rather than something this book shows them doing. We follow that older thread in our pomander history.

If you have ever made a studded orange yourself, you will know why it never goes out of fashion. The peel gives off its citrus scent as the cloves go in, the skin dries slowly, and in a week or two the whole thing turns hard and fragrant. It is a craft that rewards patience and asks for nothing more than an orange, a handful of cloves and a thimble to push them in.

How much weight one cookbook can carry

A household manual is a fair guide to a certain kind of kitchen and a poorer guide to church decorations, nurseries, poorer homes, or anything passed down by example and never written. Beeton also borrowed freely from earlier writers. So we treat her recipes as evidence of what she wrote down, and we would gladly see a diary or a trade catalogue that shows spice garlands. Until then, the safest summary is that cloves in the Victorian record are a kitchen spice first and a decoration second.

A Victorian clove table today

If you like the sound of that, you do not need our oil for it. Mulled wine with whole cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon follows Beeton to the letter, and an onion stuck with cloves in the stockpot does the same job it did in 1861. Whole buds come from the grocery store and are a different thing from the oil, which is a concentrate not meant for eating. Our post on whether you can ingest clove oil explains the difference.

For an evening that borrows from the book, start with a pot of water, a few whole cloves, a stick of cinnamon and a grating of nutmeg. Let it warm on the stove while you lay the table. The kitchen fills with the smell of an old-fashioned winter, and nobody needs to know it took ten minutes.

If you would rather have the scent in the room, our simmer pot recipes and potpourri ideas are the modern descendants of that warm kitchen smell. For the wider tradition, look at clove customs and the clove trade.