From garam masala to mulled wine, baked ham to apple pie, Chinese five-spice to Arabian baharat, cloves are used in almost every cuisine. Their pungent, warming, peppery sweetness is so well liked that they are used for their fragrance alone in studded oranges (originally used to ward off the plague) and Indonesian cigarettes. They are the dried flower buds of a tropical tree native to the Mollucas in the South China Sea. Medicinally, they are antiseptic, and clove oil is a traditional and effective remedy for toothache.