THE HISTORY OF CEYLON CINNAMON

MEDIA GALLERY
cinnamon oil

Features	Cassia	Ceylon Cinnamon
Bouquet/Smell	Strong	Subtle Sophisticated
Color	Dark Red Brown	Light brown
Outer appearance	Very hard	Soft and crumbly
Inner filling	Hollow tube	Filled like a cigar
Taste	Spicy and strong flavor, milder aroma	Mild and sweeter taste, hints of Citrus and fragrant aroma
Grown in	China, Vietnam, Indonesia	Ceylon (Sri Lanka)
Other Names	Saigon Cinnamon	True or real Cinnamon
Coumarin Content	5%	0.004%
Botanical Name	Cinnamomum Cassia	Cinnamomum Zeylanicum ( Latin name for Ceylon)

Cinnamon is a tropical evergreen tree whose leaves and inner bark is used to make Cinnamon oil and cinnamon sticks. Leaves from a wild cinnamon tree is harvested by growing the tree for two years then coppicing it. The next year, about a dozen shoots will form from the roots. The branches harvested this way are processed by scraping off the outer bark, then beating the branch evenly with a hammer to loosen the inner bark. The inner bark is then pried out in long rolls.

Only the thin (0.5 mm (0.020 in)) inner bark is used; the outer, woody portion is discarded, leaving meter-long cinnamon strips that curl into rolls ("quills") on drying. Once dry, the bark is cut into 5–10 cm (2.0–3.9 in) lengths for sale.

The bark must be processed immediately after harvesting while still wet. Once processed, the bark will dry completely in four to six hours, provided that it is in a well-ventilated and relatively warm environment.

A less than ideal drying environment encourages the proliferation of pests in the bark, which may then require treatment by fumigation. Bark treated this way is not considered to be of the same premium quality as untreated bark.

Cinnamon has been cultivated from time immemorial in Sri Lanka, and the tree is also grown commercially at Kerala in southern India, Bangladesh, Java, Sumatra, the West Indies, Brazil, Vietnam, Madagascar, Zanzibar, and Egypt.

Sri Lanka cinnamon has a very thin, smooth bark with a light-yellowish brown color and a highly fragrant aroma. In recent years in Sri Lanka, mechanical devices have been developed to ensure premium quality and worker safety and health, following considerable research by the Universities in that country led by the University of Ruhuna. According to the International Herald Tribune, in 2006 Sri Lanka produced 90% of the world's cinnamon, followed by China, India, and Vietnam. According to the FAO, Indonesia produces 40% of the world's Cassia genus of cinnamon.

Grading Cinnamon Sticks

Ceylon Cinnamon sticks from Sri Lanka is graded into 4 main categories as follows :

GRADE	SIZE
Alba	less than 6 mm (0.24 in) in diameter
Continental	less than 16 mm (0.63 in) in diameter
C5 Special
C5
C4
Mexican	less than 19 mm (0.75 in) in diameter
M5
M4
Hamburg	less than 32 mm (1.3 in) in diameter
H1
H2

These groups are further divided into specific grades. For example, Mexican is divided into M00 000 special, M000000, and M0000, depending on quill diameter and number of quills per kg. Any pieces of bark less than 106 mm (4.2 in) long are categorized as quillings. Feathering's are the inner bark of twigs and twisted shoots.

Chips are trimmings of quills, outer and inner bark that cannot be separated, or the bark of small twigs. Ceylon cinnamon, using only the thin inner bark, has a finer, less dense, and more crumbly texture has more sophisticated smell compared to Cassia Cinnamon which has a much stronger (somewhat harsher) flavor than Ceylon cinnamon, is generally a medium to light reddish brown, hard and woody in texture, and thicker (2–3 mm (0.079–0.12 in) thick), as all of the layers of bark are used.

Due to the presence of a moderately toxic component called coumarin, European health agencies have recently warned against consuming large amounts of cassia. This is contained in much lower dosages in Ceylon Cinnamon due to its low essential oil content. Coumarin is known to cause liver and kidney damage in high concentrations. Ceylon cinnamon has negligible amounts of coumarin.The barks, when whole, are easily distinguished, and their microscopic characteristics are also quite distinct.

Ceylon cinnamon sticks (or quills) have many thin layers and can easily be made into powder using a coffee or spice grinder, whereas cassia sticks are much harder. Indonesian cinnamon is often sold in neat quills made up of one thick layer, capable of damaging a spice or coffee grinder. Saigon cinnamon and Chinese cinnamon are always sold as broken pieces of thick bark, as the bark is not supple enough to be rolled into quills.

Ceylon Cinnamon has been known for hundreds if not centuries. It was particularly prized for its health in the middle east. Ancient Egyptians used it as long ago as 2000 BCE and even the Bible makes mention of Cinnamon in proverb 7:17 when it says " "I have sprinkled my bed With myrrh, aloes and cinnamon ". While its source was kept a mystery by the traders to their source, today it is well known that Cinnamon came from the tiny Island of Sri Lanka located at the tip of India. This is the true home of Cinnamon.

Cinnamon was a component of the Ketoret which is used when referring to the consecrated incense described in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. It was offered on the specialized incense altar in the time when the Tabernacle was located in the First and Second Jerusalem Temples. The ketoret was an important component of the Temple service in Jerusalem. It was so highly prized among ancient nations that it was regarded as a gift fit for monarchs and even for a god: a fine inscription records the gift of cinnamon and cassia to the temple of Apollo at Miletus. It is also alluded to by Herodotus and other classical writers.

It was too expensive to be commonly used on funeral pyres in Rome, but the Emperor Nero is said to have burned a year's worth of the city's supply at the funeral for his wife Poppaea Sabina in AD 65.[10] </ Before the foundation of Cairo, Alexandria was the Mediterranean shipping port of cinnamon. Europeans who knew the Latin writers who were quoting Herodotus knew that cinnamon came up the Red Sea to the trading ports of Egypt, but whether from Ethiopia or not was less than clear. When the Sieur de Joinville accompanied his king to Egypt on crusade in 1248, he reported what he had been told—and believed—that cinnamon was fished up in nets at the source of the Nile out at the edge of the world.

Through the Middle Ages, the source of cinnamon was a mystery to the Western world. Marco Polo avoided precision on this score. In Herodotus and other authors, Arabia was the source of cinnamon: giant Cinnamon birds collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew and used them to construct their nests; the Arabs employed a trick to obtain the sticks. This story was current as late as 1310 in Byzantium, although in the first century, Pliny the Elder had written that the traders had made this up in order to charge more.

The first mention of the spice growing in Sri Lanka was in Zakariya al-Qazwini's Athar al-bilad wa-akhbar al-‘ibad ("Monument of Places and History of God's Bondsmen") in about 1270.This was followed shortly thereafter by John of Montecorvino, in a letter of about 1292. Indonesian rafts transported cinnamon (known in Indonesia as kayu manis- literally "sweet wood") on a "cinnamon route" directly from the Moluccas to East Africa, where local traders then carried it north to the Roman market. Arab traders brought the spice via overland trade routes to Alexandria in Egypt, where it was bought by Venetian traders from Italy who held a monopoly on the spice trade in Europe. The disruption of this trade by the rise of other Mediterranean powers, such as the Mamluk Sultans and the Ottoman Empire, was one of many factors that led Europeans to search more widely for other routes to Asia.

Portuguese traders finally landed in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) at the beginning of the sixteenth century and restructured the traditional production and management of cinnamon by the Sinhalese, who later held the monopoly for cinnamon in Ceylon. The Portuguese established a fort on the island in 1518 and protected their own monopoly for over a hundred years.

Dutch traders finally dislodged the Portuguese by allying with the inland Kingdom of Kandy. They established a trading post in 1638, took control of the factories by 1640, and expelled all remaining Portuguese by 1658. "The shores of the island are full of it", a Dutch captain reported, "and it is the best in all the Orient: when one is downwind of the island, one can still smell cinnamon eight leagues out to sea." The Dutch East India Company continued to overhaul the methods of harvesting in the wild and eventually began to cultivate its own trees.

In 1767, Lord Brown of East India Company established Anjarakkandy Cinnamon Estate near Anjarakkandy in Cannanore (now Kannur) district of Kerala, and this estate became Asia's largest cinnamon estate. The British took control of the island from the Dutch in 1796. However, the importance of the monopoly of Ceylon was already declining, as cultivation of the cinnamon tree spread to other areas, the more common cassia bark became more acceptable to consumers, and coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate began to outstrip the popularity of traditional spices. Source : Wikipedia