Cinnamon Cinnamomum verum
Most jars hold cassia — hot and blunt. True Ceylon is paler, more fragile and more floral. They do not substitute for each other.
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
Sticks early, ground late
A whole stick needs liquid and time, so it goes into the rice, the braise or the syrup at the start. Ground cinnamon releases immediately and dulls with long cooking, so it goes in near the end or into a batter.
It belongs in savoury food
The Anglophone association with sugar is a local habit, not a rule. Cinnamon is standard in Moroccan tagines, Persian rice, Greek beef stews, Mexican moles and Indian biryani, where nobody thinks of it as a dessert spice.
Toast the stick
Thirty seconds in the dry pan or in hot fat before the liquid goes in, until you can smell it. The difference in a rice pilaf between a toasted stick and an untoasted one is easy to taste side by side.
Beyond the kitchen
EGYPTIAN EMBALMING
Cinnamon and cassia appear in Egyptian mortuary preparation and in temple incense, and are named in the Hebrew Bible among the components of holy anointing oil. Its ritual life predates its culinary one by a long way in the Mediterranean world.
THE CINNAMON BIRD
Herodotus records that cinnamon was gathered from the nests of giant birds in Arabia — a story Arab traders appear to have encouraged for centuries to conceal the real source in Sri Lanka and protect their margins. It worked until the Portuguese arrived in 1505.
COLONIAL SRI LANKA
Control of Ceylon's cinnamon passed from Portuguese to Dutch to British hands between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Dutch ran it as a strict state monopoly with severe penalties for unauthorised harvesting. The island's colonial history is partly a history of this bark.
PERFUME AND SCENT
Cinnamon and cassia oils are long-standing notes in perfumery and in the oriental and gourmand families in particular. Cinnamaldehyde is also widely used as a flavouring in confectionery and as a food-grade fragrance.
A longer history
Cinnamon was among the earliest long-distance traded goods, reaching Egypt and the Levant from South and Southeast Asia in the second millennium BCE. It is named in the Hebrew Bible, in Egyptian records and throughout Greek and Roman writing, and its price and prestige were such that Arab intermediaries kept its true origin secret for centuries — the giant-bird story Herodotus reports is the best known of several deliberate obfuscations.
The Portuguese reached Sri Lanka in 1505 and the secret ended. What followed was three centuries of contested colonial control over a single island's bark, passing to the Dutch in the 1650s and to the British in 1796, run for most of that time as a tightly enforced monopoly.
The split between true cinnamon and cassia is the practical legacy of all this. Sri Lanka still produces most of the world's Cinnamomum verum, while the far larger global trade in cassia comes from China, Vietnam and Indonesia. Mexico is the largest importer of true cinnamon, which is why Mexican cooking has a noticeably different cinnamon character from North American baking.
CASSIA AND COUMARIN
Cassia contains coumarin, a naturally occurring compound that true Sri Lankan cinnamon has only in trace amounts. Several European food safety bodies have set tolerable daily intake guidance for coumarin, and have issued advice about heavy regular consumption of cassia in particular. This is a matter of which bark you are buying and how much of it you eat routinely — check the guidance from your own food safety authority rather than taking it from here.