Where did cinnamon come from?
For centuries, it remained a mystery. The roads to Sri Lanka were long and arduous, and Ceylon, as it was first known, apparently was the only source of this rare and expensive spice--cinnamon, sold only to kings, or given in honor of the gods.
Eventually, cinnamon made its way to Europe. Those clever descendants of Ice Age nomads and Neanderthals had their own gods, and their own agendas. They were explorers, conquistadors, adventurers, entrepreneurs, and generally bad-ass, which is to say, not the type to take no for an answer. These are the guys who inspired the board game Settlers of Catan, which involves fighting over limited resources. If 16th Century conquistadors could see there weren’t enough of something to go around, so they’d go off on a quest for new resources. Think Marco Polo. Columbus. Spice routes. Trade wars.
Nobody said they were nice guys.
The Portuguese found their way to the island of Ceylon, and someone figured out that the bark of the laurel tree was the source of that highly coveted commodity, cinnamon. It was hardly a resource, but it was something worth fighting for. The Portuguese, with sheer brute force, took control of the trade routes to Ceylon and the riches that cinnamon brought.
Their iron-fisted rein lasted barely a century. Along came the French, then the English.
Some enterprising bad-ass, in the late 1700s, took laurel tree saplings and cultivated them in other parts of the world. Now the laurel tree was taking root in Indonesia, Pacific islands, and South America, bringing the mythical health benefits and culinary delights of cinnamon to anyone who could pay the price, not just kings.
Ding!
My five minutes are up. (Okay, more like fifteen, but I might set timers a little sloppily.) I have flunked another Five Minute Freewrite! This is just my outline of the fictional version I might try to spin.
But I will share this one, anyway, because it’s been a while. Special thanks to @ebitularmbert for the kind words and the nudge (which I found 2 days after he replied to my haiku post):
Resources. Sources. My own brief and biased history of cinnamon derives, loosely, from [bespokespices.com] (http://www.bespokespices.com/history-of-cinnamon.html).
*pixabay image courtesy of adege
I told there's much to learn from you 😉
I would be much more cultivated if you were my history teacher! And by cultivated I mean I would have one or two true informations 😅
You have a way with making a random information stick in the brain
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So, did you know cinnamon comes from the bark of the laurel tree? ;-) I kinda-sort knew it came from the bark of some shrubbery or other, but not this massive tree, which, at first, grew only in Sri Lanka.
How common it is today! How priceless it was, just a few centuries ago.
Thanks for the kind words, Hazem - we teach each other!
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