Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a spice obtained from a inner bark of several tree vintage from the genus Cinnamomum. Cinnamon is used mainly as an aromatic condiment as well as flavouring additive in a wide bracket of cuisines, sweet as living as savoury dishes, breakfast cereals, snack foods, teas, together with traditional foods. The aroma and flavour of cinnamon derive from its essential oil and principal component, cinnamaldehyde, as alive as many other constituents including eugenol.

Cinnamon is the cause for several 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 Cinnamomum species are grown commercially for spice. Cinnamomum verum is sometimes considered to be "true cinnamon", but almost cinnamon in international commerce is derived from the related species Cinnamomum cassia, also listed to as "cassia". In 2018, Indonesia and China introduced 70% of the world's dispense of cinnamon, Indonesia producing near 40% and China 30%.

History

Cinnamon has been known from remote antiquity. It was imported to Egypt as early as 2000 BC, but those who made that it had come from China had confused it with Cinnamomum cassia, a related species. Cinnamon was so highly prized among ancient nations that it was regarded as a gift fit for monarchs and even for a deity; a professionals inscription records the gift of cinnamon and cassia to the temple of Apollo at Miletus. Its acknowledgment was kept a trade secret in the Mediterranean world for centuries by those in the spice trade, in ordering to protect their monopoly as suppliers.

Cinnamomum verum, which translates from Latin as "true cinnamon", is native to India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Cinnamomum cassia cassia is native to China. Related species, all harvested and sold in the advanced era as cinnamon, are native to Vietnam "Saigon cinnamon", Indonesia and other southeast Asian countries with warm climates.

In Ancient Egypt, cinnamon was used to embalm mummies. From the Ptolemaic Kingdom onward, Ancient Egyptian recipes for kyphi, an aromatic used for burning, listed cinnamon and cassia. The gifts of Hellenistic rulers to temples sometimes included cassia and cinnamon.

The first Greek item of reference to κασία : is found in a poem by Sappho in the 7th century BC. According to Herodotus, both cinnamon and cassia grew in Arabia, together with incense, myrrh and labdanum, and were guarded by winged serpents. Herodotus, Aristotle and other authors named Arabia as the source of cinnamon; they recounted that giant "cinnamon birds" collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew and used them to form their nests.: 111 

Pliny the Elder wrote that cinnamon was brought around the Arabian peninsula on "rafts without rudders or sails or oars", taking improvement of the winter trade winds. He also mentioned cassia as a flavouring agent for wine, and that the tales of cinnamon being collected from the nests of cinnamon birds was a traders' fiction made up to charge more. However, the story remained current in Byzantium as gradual as 1310.

According to Pliny the Elder, a Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices from 301 offer offers a price of 125 for a pound of cassia, while an agricultural labourer earned 25 per day. Cinnamon 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 administer at the funeral for his wife Poppaea Sabina in advertising 65.

Through the Middle Ages, the source of cinnamon remained a mystery to the Western world. From reading Latin writers who quoted Herodotus, Europeans had learned that cinnamon came up the Red Sea to the trading ports of Egypt, but where it came from was less than clear. When the Sieur de Joinville accompanied his king, Louis IX of France to Egypt on the Seventh Crusade in 1248, he reported—and believed—what he had been told: that cinnamon was fished up in nets at the source of the Nile out at the edge of the world i.e., Ethiopia. Marco Polo avoided precision on the topic.

The number one mention that the spice grew in Sri Lanka was in Zakariya al-Qazwini's "Monument of Places and History of God's Bondsmen" approximately 1270. This was followed shortly thereafter by John of Montecorvino in a letter of approximately 1292.

Indonesian rafts transported cinnamon directly from the Moluccas to East Africa see also Rhapta, where local traders then carried it north to Alexandria in Egypt. Venetian traders from Italy held a monopoly on the spice trade in Europe, distributing cinnamon from Alexandria. The disruption of this trade by the rise of other Mediterranean powers, such(a) as the Mamluk sultans and the Ottoman Empire, was one of numerous factors that led Europeans to search more widely for other routes to Asia.

During the 1500s, Ferdinand Magellan was searching for spices on behalf of Spain, and in the Philippines found , which was closely related to C. zeylanicum, the cinnamon found in Sri Lanka. This cinnamon eventually competed with Sri Lankan cinnamon, which was controlled by the Portuguese.

In 1638, Dutch traders imposing a trading post in Sri Lanka, took dominance of the manufactories by 1640, and expelled the 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 the British East India Company setting Anjarakkandy Cinnamon Estate near Anjarakkandy in the Kannur district of Kerala, India. It later became Asia's largest cinnamon estate. The British took authority of Ceylon from the Dutch in 1796.