True Cinnamon, the Royal Sister of a Commoner

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/dining/true-cinnamon-the-royal-sister-of-a-commoner.html

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On a trip to Sri Lanka earlier this year, I inhaled the heady aroma of cinnamon almost everywhere I went: in the lobby of my hotel, at roadside food stands, and on a plantation that has been processing cinnamon bark, lotion and oil for three generations.

I could not seem to escape that scent, and I was glad of it. This was real cinnamon, not the more common cassia that we buy in the grocery store. This was the spice that inspired King Solomon to send explorers to the Indian subcontinent.

“Cassia is the robust older brother of cinnamon,” Simone Cormier, a chef and the national spice coordinator for Whole Foods, told me when I returned. “Cinnamon is the delicate younger sister.”

In Sri Lanka, I bought a bowl inlaid with cinnamon bark and sampled a slightly sweet bun filled with seeni sambol, an onion confit relish flavored with ginger, tamarind and cinnamon. It tasted both foreign and familiar, with the homey quality I remember from Jewish sweet onion rolls.

Perhaps the best part of the trip was learning about cinnamon and eating a lunch of cinnamon-perfumed dishes at the home of Chaminda de Silva. Ceylonese cinnamon is cultivated on his 25-acre property, part of the roughly 90,000 acres in small cinnamon plantations mostly in southern Sri Lanka. Plantation workers scrape off the outer layer of cinnamon branches four feet long, drying them for three days until the bark curls into cinnamon sticks lighter and more crumbly than those most of us know in the United States. Some is then ground on the property; some is sent to spice companies, mostly in Mexico and South America, to be ground.

At lunch on the estate, we washed our fingers at the table and then used them to eat a cinnamon-spiced chicken giblet curry served from an open fireplace.

Back home, hungry for the seeni sambol buns I recalled from the lobby of the Bentota Beach Hotel, I e-mailed the chef for his recipe and tinkered with it, enriching the dough with extra sugar and egg, reducing the spiciness but preserving the memory of the cinnamon-laced onion filling.