Cinnamon | Plant, Spice, History, & Uses (2024)

cinnamon, (Cinnamomum verum), bushy evergreen tree of the laurel family (Lauraceae) and the spice derived from its bark. Cinnamon is native to Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), the neighbouring Malabar Coast of India, and Myanmar (Burma) and is also cultivated in South America and the West Indies. The spice, consisting of the dried inner bark, is brown in colour and has a delicately fragrant aroma and a warm sweet flavour. Cinnamon is used to flavour a variety of foods, from confections to curries to beverages, and is popular in bakery goods in many places. Essential oil is distilled from the bark fragments for use in food, liqueur, perfume, and drugs.

Cinnamon was once more valuable than gold. In Egypt it was sought for embalming and religious practices. In medieval Europe it was used for religious rites and as a flavouring. Later it was the most profitable spice in the Dutch East India Company trade. Various related species are also cultivated as a source of cinnamon spice, including Chinese cassia (Cinnamomum cassia), Vietnamese, or Saigon, cinnamon (C. loureiroi), Indonesian cinnamon (C. burmannii), and Malabar cinnamon (C. citriodorum).

Physical description

The cinnamon tree grows in moist well-drained soils and rarely reaches more than 15 metres (49 feet) in height. The thick simple leaves have smooth margins and are usually oval; the veins are roughly parallel to each other. Young leaves are red and mature to a deep green. The small bisexual flowers are greenish to yellow and are borne in clusters. The fruit is a dark drupe.

Cinnamon contains 0.5 to 1 percent essential oil, the principal component of which is cinnamic aldehyde.

Harvest and processing

The grower harvests the main crop in the wet season, cutting the shoots close to the ground. In processing, the shoots are first scraped with a semicircular blade and then rubbed with a brass rod to loosen the bark, which is split with a knife and peeled. The peels are telescoped one into another, forming a quill about 107 cm (42 inches) long and filled with trimmings of the same quality bark to maintain a cylindrical shape. After four or five days of drying, the quills are rolled on a board to tighten the filling and then placed in subdued sunlight for further drying. Finally, they are bleached with sulfur dioxide and sorted into grades.