Holiday Cooking – Cinnamon

This month I’m learning more about the plants that favor my holiday baking. Today, I’m taking a look at cinnamon, which I use to flavor pumpkin pie, zucchini bread, molasses cookies, and apple sauce. While growing up, Dad made the best cinnamon and sugar toast, placing the toast under the broiler until the butter, cinnamon, and sugar mixture bubbled, but did not burn. Cinnamon sticks make great stir-sticks for hot apple cider, spice up holiday potpourri, and look pretty tied to a wrapped gift or jar of jam.

Cinnamomum verum (formerly called C. zeylanicum) is in the Lauraceae family (same family as laurel or bay leaves). Cinnamon originated in Southeast Asia, Australia, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and is distinct from but similar to Cinnamomum aromaticum (cassia), which originated in China. Cinnamon was traded throughout Persia, the Mediterranean, and Middle East in ancient times (as early as 2000 B.C.in Egypt), and used for cooking, medicine, perfume, anointing oil, and embalming. The spice factored into Christopher Columbus’s quest for an alternate spice route; and became more available to Europe in the 1600s. Cinnamon is now grown in tropical and subtropical climates, such as Java, Sumatra, and Borneo. Scholarly research is currently being done for medicinal purposes, such as boosting the immune system, as an antiviral, and to combat Alzheimer's disease.

Botanical illustration of Cinnamomum verum
from Koehler’s Medicinal Plants (published
before 1923 and public domain in the United States).

Cinnamon is harvested from the inner bark of an evergreen tree. Its leaves are ovate or ovate-lancelot, to 7 inches long, aromatic, shiny green above, and lighter green below; flowers are tiny and yellowish, bunched at the branch tips in panicles; propagation is from seeds or cuttings. Once the tree is established, the tree is cut back severely. In two years, six to eight shoots are ready for harvest, and the tree is cut back again. Harvesters use sharp knives to strip the outer bark and harvest the inner bark during the rainy season. The inner bark is dried, first in the shade and then the sun. The rolls are telescoped into meter long (39 inches) quills. The quills are later cut into shorter lengths, or ground for retail distribution.