The Hebrew
Bible makes specific mention of the spice many times: first when Moses is commanded to use both sweet cinnamon Hebrew: קִנָּמוֹן, qinnāmôn) and cassia in the holy anointing oil; in Proverbs where the lover's bed is perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon; and in Song of Solomon , a song describing the beauty of his beloved, cinnamon scents her garments like 'the smell of Lebanon'. Cassia was also part of the ketoret, the consecrated incense described in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. It was offered on the specialized incense altar in the time when the Tabernacle was located in the First and Second Jerusalem temples. The ketoret was an important component of the temple service in Jerusalem . Psalm 45:8 mentions the garments of the king (or of Torah scholars) that smell of myrrh, aloes, and cassia.
Pliny gives an account of the early spice trade across the Red Sea that cost Rome 100 million sescertes each year. Cinnamon was brought around the Arabian Peninsula on "rafts without rudders or sails or oars", taking advantage of the winter trade winds. Pliny also mentions cassia as a flavoring agent for wine.
According to Pliny, a Roman pound (327 grams (11.5 oz)) of cassia, cinnamon, or serichatum cost up to 300 denarii, the wage of ten months' labour. Dioction's Edict on Maxium prices from 301 AD gives a price of 125 denarii for a pound of cassia while an agricultural labourer earned 25 denarii 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 supply at the funeral for his wife Poppaea Sabina in AD 65.
Malabathrum leaves (folia) were used in cooking and for distilling an oil used in a caraway sauce for oysters by the Roman gourmet Gaius Gavius Apicius. Malabathrum is among the spices that, according to Apicius, any good kitchen should contain.
The famous Commagenum unguent produced in Commagene, in present-day eastern Turkey, was made from goose fat aromatised with cinnamon oil and spikenard. Malobathrum from Egypt (Dioscorides I, 63) was based on beef fat and contained cinnamon, as well; one pound cost 300 denarii. The Roman poet Martial (VI, 55) made fun of Romans who drip unguents, smell of cassia and cinnamon taken from a bird's nest, and look down on a man who does not smell at all.
Through the Middle Ages, the source of cinnamon was 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 to Egypt on 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. Herodotus and other authors named Arabia as the source of cinnamon: they recounted that a giant cinnamon birds collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew and used them to construct their nests, and that the Arabs employed a trick to obtain the sticks. Pliny the Elder wrote in the first century that traders had made this up to charge more, but the story remained current in Byzantium as late as 1310.
The first mention that the spice grew in Sri Lanka was in Zakariya al-qazwini's Athar al-bilad wa-akhbar al-‘ibad ("Monument of Places and History of God's Bondsmen") about 1270. This was followed shortly thereafter by John of Montecorvino in a letter of about 1292.
Indonesian rafts transported cinnamon directly from the Moluccas to East Africa , 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 as the Mameluke sultans and the Ottoman Empire, was one of many factors that led Europeans to search more widely for other routes to Asia.
When Portuguese traders landed in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), they restructured the traditional production and management of cinnamon by the Sinhalese. They established a fort on the island in 1518 and protected Ceylon as their cinnamon monopoly for over a hundred years. Later, Sinhalese held the monopoly for cinnamon in Ceylon.
Dutch traders finally dislodged the Portuguese by allying with the inland Kingdom of Kandy. They established a trading post in 1638, took control 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." :15 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 East India Company established Anjarakkandy Cinnamon Estate near Anjarakkandy in Cannanore (now Kannur) district of Kerala , and this estate became Asia's largest cinnamon estate. The British took control of Ceylon from the Dutch in 1796. However, the importance of the monopoly of Ceylon was already declining, as cultivation of the cinnamon tree spread to other areas, the more common cassia bark became more acceptable to consumers, and coffee , tea, sugar, and chocolate began to outstrip the popularity of traditional spices.
REPORTED CYLON CINNAMON BENEFITS
NUTRITION INFORMATION
HIGH IN ANTIOXIDANTS, MAY DESTROY CANCER CELLS: The antioxidant benefits of the Ceylon Cinnamon Ground Powder, combined with the fatty acids it contains, make this one of the most important superfoods on the market. The Ceylon Cinnamon Ground Powder is thought to have an antioxidant content that is 20 times greater than that found in grapes, and twice as high as those found in blueberries. The Ceylon Cinnamon Ground Powder is widely acknowledged to have the highest nutritional value of any spice or food in the world, and this has earned the Ceylon Cinnamon Ground Powder the title of “Superfood”.
ORAC RATING
“ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. ORAC measures the ability of just about any substance to subdue oxygen free radicals in the test tube. In short, ORAC is a lab assay that can measure the antioxidant activity of any substance and give it a number. The higher the ORAC number – the stronger the antioxidant properties of the substance.
National Institute on Aging developed the ORAC method and the US Department of Agriculture and Brunswick Labs have been instrumental in perfecting the ORAC assay procedure and testing various foods to determine ORAC levels.
The exact science behind ORAC is beyond the scope of this report but it is clear that if you want foods with greater antioxidant properties, you look for foods with high ORAC levels. The USDA recommends we consume 3,000 to 5,000 ORAC units daily. Approximately 80% of the population is consuming less than 1,000 ORAC units daily. Fruits and vegetables tend to have the highest ORAC values. Organic Ceylon Cinnamin Powder has an ORAC value of 267,536
*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.
Ingredients
Research on the Ceylon Cinnamon indicates that no known side effects have been reported. The Ceylon Cinnamon has been around for years; it is still quite new to the United States and still being observed and researched by health professionals.
