Wood you believe it?

Pepper got all the attention. But cinnamon has a bloodied and rather grisly story too. From ancient dragons and pharaonic funeral rites to Dutch empires and devastated coastal landscapes, this is the spice that “also” changed the world

- Rachna Shetty

It was once considered so precious, it was used in offerings to the gods.

Today, it’s in soaps and spa treatments, Coca-Cola and candles, lattes and doughnuts.

How did cinnamon get everywhere? The spice was once the stuff of legends.

Arab traders spun elaborate tales to keep Europeans from finding out where they sourced it. They said, for instance, that there were giant birds who gathered these bits of bark from “unknown trees”, and built nests with them. The traders left huge chunks of meat for the birds to carry away; when the nests cracked under the weight of the meat, the cinnamon supposedly rained down to the ground. Other tales told of cinnamon that came from marshes protected by giant bats or winged serpents.

By the 1st century CE, the bark was so expensive that a pound of it cost the equivalent of several months of the average wage in Rome.

Europe remained hooked. This spice was considered a panacea, flaunted as a status symbol. Then a new era dawned. Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire, in 1453. The search for new trade routes began.

The craze for this spice, among others, would drive history, commerce, trade and exploitation. In the case of cinnamon, most of this activity would be focused in Sri Lanka, with Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Malabar coast in India emerging as smaller hubs.

Cinnamon has historically grown most widely in Sri Lanka, South-East Asia and China. But only Sri Lanka grew Cinnamomum verum or true cinnamon: thin, flaky, with a delicate and well-rounded flavour.

Elsewhere, it was Cinnamomum cassia: thicker, darker and more pungent. (Vietnam and Indonesia have their own variants, C. loureirii and C. burmanni respectively.)

In India, the term for cinnamon (used for both varieties) comes from the Chinese variant: dalchini; literally, “Chinese wood”. Confusion over the two key variants, incidentally, persists even today, with a lot of cassia sold as true cinnamon.