# Clove rock

**Canonical URL:** https://sweeties.net/wiki/clove-rock/
**Source:** sweeties.net, online pick and mix sweet shop

## Summary

Clove rock is a hard sweet with the warm taste of cloves, the Spice Islands bud long used for toothache. The recipe here uses flavouring, not real cloves.

## Description

Clove rock is a hard boiled sweet with the warm, spicy taste of cloves. Crilly's Clove Rocks, recorded by Open Food Facts in a 100 g bag, are one example.
What is in it
Crilly's Clove Rocks, as recorded by Open Food Facts. Sugar, glucose syrup, water, beetroot red as the colour, and flavouring. The label warns that the sweets may contain nuts, milk, soya and gluten.
There is no clove in the list. The clove taste comes from flavouring, and the colour from beetroot red: see how are sweets flavoured?
What cloves are
Cloves are the dried, aromatic flower buds of a tree, Syzygium aromaticum. The buds start pale, turn green, then bright red when they are ready to pick. The tree is native to the Maluku Islands of Indonesia, and until the colonial era cloves grew on only a few islands there, the Spice Islands, including Ternate and Tidore. Chinese merchants were sailing there to trade for cloves by the time of the Yuan dynasty, between 1271 and 1368.
Why cloves taste medicinal
A major part of the taste of cloves comes from one chemical, eugenol. Clove oil has long been used in traditional medicine, mainly for dental emergencies, and there is evidence that clove oil containing eugenol helps with toothache. Cloves also flavour toothpaste, soaps and cosmetics.
That warm, medicinal taste puts clove rock alongside other old British sweets for cold days: see cough candy, winter mixture and Coltsfoot Rock
Safety
Clove rock is a hard sweet, and the NHS says not to give younger children hard foods such as boiled sweets, because of the risk of choking: see hard sweets and younger children
In our pick and mix
We do not sell clove rock, but we do sell SW038, another traditional spiced sweet. Each card opens up to show the full ingredients and allergens for the sweets we actually stock.

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