Cinnamon

Cinnamon is the aromatic inner bark of Cinnamomum trees, dried into quills, and in the ancient Mediterranean it was a costly import whose true source, South and Southeast Asia, was hidden behind the traders who carried it. It is named among the ingredients of the holy anointing oil in Exodus 30, and it recurs as a mark of luxury and delight in Proverbs, the Song of Songs and the lament over fallen Babylon in Revelation. Pliny, drawing on Herodotus, repeats the fable that cinnamon was gathered from the nests of a great bird that built with the sticks in inaccessible cliffs, a story the Arabian middlemen were happy to encourage, since it concealed the real trade route and justified the price.

Control of true cinnamon shaped the colonial history of Sri Lanka much as nutmeg and clove shaped the Moluccas: the Portuguese, then the Dutch East India Company, and finally the British East India Company each in turn fought for and held a monopoly over the island's cinnamon-producing coastal regions from the sixteenth century onward, a valuable trade that helped draw three successive European colonial powers to the same island in succession. Sri Lanka remains the source of the great majority of the world's true cinnamon today, its export still marketed internationally as Ceylon cinnamon to distinguish it from the cheaper cassia grown mainly in Indonesia and China.

What is sold as cinnamon is really two things: true cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum, the Ceylon cinnamon of Sri Lanka), milder and more delicate, and cassia (Cinnamomum cassia and relatives), stronger, cheaper and the common supermarket cinnamon, especially in the Americas. The ancient sources already distinguish cinnamon and cassia, though not always in a way that maps onto the modern species. In the correspondence traditions cinnamon is a warm, solar and fiery spice, burned as incense for its heating, elevating quality and associated with the Sun and with success, prosperity and love, a reading drawn straightforwardly from its genuine warmth of scent and taste rather than from any hidden property.

A genuine modern health distinction separates the two spices: cassia cinnamon contains far higher levels of coumarin, a compound that can affect the liver in large amounts, than true Ceylon cinnamon does, and food safety authorities including the European Food Safety Authority have issued specific guidance advising against very high regular consumption of cassia-type cinnamon for this reason, a rare case in this atlas of an everyday kitchen spice carrying an actual, quantified, officially assessed health caveat rather than an old wives' warning. True cinnamon, lower in coumarin, is not subject to the same caution, though most cinnamon sold cheaply in North American supermarkets is in fact cassia rather than the true Ceylon spice.

Sources Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical HerbsScott Cunningham with The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd editionOxford University Press, Plants of the World OnlineRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew