Cinnamon comes from the inner bark of an evergreen tree. As the bark dries and cracks, the spice is separated from its shell. The drying process can take one to three years. After harvesting, cinnamon is sun-dried for three days and then sorted by hand. Its color varies from white to reddish-brown, depending on its degree of refinement.

The culinary use of cinnamon predates written history. Ancient Egyptians used it as a preservative in their embalming process and to perfume their homes and temples. Early Greeks and Romans also used it to flavor wine, meat and other dishes.

Spices were expensive in ancient times. In the Middle Ages, cinnamon was one of the most valuable spices by weight — only gold and silver were considered more valuable — especially during the 1000-year period between 300 B.C.E. and 1400 C.E., when it was imported into Europe through Arab traders as a result of Islamic expansion in Asia Minor (modern Turkey).

Taste: Cinnamon is a warm, sweet spice that imparts a fragrant aroma to foods. It is commonly used in desserts such as pies or cookies, but it also is used in savory dishes including stews, curries and breads (particularly apple or

Cinnamon is the inner bark of an evergreen tree native to Sri Lanka and India. The ancient Egyptians and Chinese both used it in cooking; its Greek name was “dragante,” for “dragon,” because of the belief, common until about 1300, that a dragon guarded the spice trees, making it hard to get at them. The Roman emperor Nero had his servants sprinkle cinnamon on his food so he could pretend to be eating the flesh of freshly slaughtered gladiators.

The wood was used to build temples in China and made into a variety of products from furniture to coffins. It was also used as medicine: Hippocrates recommended it for stomach problems, Arabic doctors for colds and sore throats, and Galen prescribed it for tuberculosis, gout, and menstrual problems.

Because of its expense, cinnamon spent much of its history as the subject of hoaxes. The best-known story involves an Egyptian pharaoh’s chief cook, who one day proclaimed that what he’d served was not really cinnamon but a mixture of cassia bark (another kind of bark used as a spice) and other spices that merely resembled cinnamon. When the pharaoh took a bite, he immediately spit it out, saying his cook had betrayed him by trying to kill him with poison

Cinnamon is an aromatic, cinnamon-flavored bark from a tropical tree. In the United States, where it was imported from India and Sri Lanka, it’s most often used in baking and in sweet dishes, like apple pie. It’s also used in savory dishes like curries, especially in its native South Asia.

Cinnamon is derived from the inner bark of several tree species from the genus Cinnamomum. The essential oil is extracted by steam distillation. The dried inner bark is cut into small pieces before being soaked in water and heated to release the cinnamaldehyde, which gives cinnamon its flavor.

The word “cinnamon” comes from the Greek kinnámón (κιννάμωμον), via Latin and Middle French. According to Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, a Persian king sent Greek envoys to purchase the exclusive right to sell cinnamon in ancient Greece around 500 BC; for as much as 600 years thereafter, cinnamon was reportedly only sold by one tribe located on an island near Ceylon.

Cinnamon is a spice obtained from the inner bark of several tree species from the genus Cinnamomum. It is used in both sweet and savoury foods. The term “cinnamon” also refers to its mid-brown colour.

The essential oil is obtained by steam distillation. Cinnamon contains anethol, eugenol, and other similar aromatic compounds, which give it its distinctive smell and flavour.

Cinnamon is the name for perhaps a dozen species of trees and the commercial spice products that some of them produce. All are members of the genus Cinnamomum in the family Lauraceae. Only a few of them are grown commercially for spice.

There is a spice called cinnamon. It has been traded on the Indian Ocean for at least two thousand years. It is made from the bark of a tree, and it was originally imported into Europe from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where it was a royal monopoly controlled by priests.

In the sixteenth century a Portuguese navigator trying to find a sea route to India sailed west instead of east, and ended up in America. He found cinnamon trees there, but they were not quite the same as the ones in Ceylon. They had been crossed with other tree species, producing what today we would call hybrids. The bark of these trees was much thicker and more difficult to work with than that of the Ceylonese original; it was also less fragrant and less flavorful. But it still tasted good enough that the Spanish began to trade for it with Native Americans, who had been using bark from this new species for centuries before anyone reached America from Europe. New World cinnamon became known as “cassia.”

Cinnamon was one of the first global commodities, traded as far away as China.* You might think that this would have given Europeans an advantage in making money off cinnamon, since they were closer to its source than anyone else. In fact it did not

Cinnamon is a familiar and popular spice, but finding it in the wild would be unlikely. To grow it, you need a climate that is hot and humid all year round, like that of Sri Lanka or Vietnam. The plant grows to about 30 feet tall with spidery branches, and its bark can be harvested after about five years of growth. At each harvest, the outer bark peels off in long strips. These strips are then ground into cinnamon powder.

A single tree produces about a pound of cinnamon per year. By contrast, a mature avocado-tree produces up to 200 pounds of fruit per year. Yet the price of a pound of cinnamon today is equivalent to the price of almost 40000 pounds of avocado’s at their peak harvest time.

The difference is that avocados are produced in huge quantities by commercial growers who use machines to harvest them cheaply and efficiently. In contrast, every ounce of cinnamon comes from a tree that has been planted, tended and harvested by hand. That makes the cost of growing and harvesting each ounce very high – which means a high price for you!

We have lost the art of cooking with spices. We think if we add some cinnamon to a dish, we’re making it taste like cinnamon. But that’s not what it’s for. Cinnamon is not a flavor, it’s a spice. It doesn’t give food an inherent taste, it makes food taste like other things.

Cinnamon was a huge hit in medieval Europe. It became more valuable than silver, because you could use it to cover the flavor of tainted meat. At the same time, sugar was considered a medicine for many different ailments, including plague and leprosy. But sugar was very rare, and usually mixed with things that made it even more valuable than cinnamon.

The combination of sugar and cinnamon was so popular that when Columbus returned from the New World with a boatload of “spices” that turned out to be peppers and tomatoes, no one wanted them.

But when Cortez conquered Mexico (1521), he brought back two kinds of “spices” unknown to Europeans: vanilla and chocolate. Vanilla is the seed pod of an orchid; chocolate is ground-up cocoa beans mixed with other things (including sometimes chili pepper). The combination of these three—cinnamon, sugar and chocolate—became such an important part of