perfidy

Brad DeLong writes:

A Theory About Cinnamon and Recipes

It strikes me that most of the standard recipes come from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the relative price of cinnamon was much higher than it is today. Thus it seems likely that most such inherited recipes economize on cinnamon to what is now an undue degree.

Proposal: triple the cinnamon in everything I cook for the next three months.

I will report back.

DeLong is an economist, and his theory makes sense only as long as you accept his givens as true. In this case, DeLong takes it as a given that the strength and quality of cinnamon has remained constant as its price has fluctuated. In truth, cinammon of a hundred years ago is completely different from cinnamon today.

True cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka and environs, and has been a popular cooking spice since antiquity. It features heavily in the cuisines of the Middle East and India, and all the cookbooks I have from along the silk road contain at least a few classic recipes requiring the spice. Indeed, one of my favorite cookbooks, Lynn Rosetto Kaspar's The Splendid Table includes many stunning savory Medieval dishes from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, many of which feature stunning quantities of cinnamon as well at nutmeg, a cooking tradition adapted from Arab traditions. Cinnamon was (of course) a mark of wealth, and the amounts called for reveal these recipes as feast dishes for the upper class, not regular home cooking for paisanos.

But here's the rub. The cinnamon we use today is far more likely to be cassia, the bark of a tree that tastes similar to cinnamon but comes from Mexico, among other places. Two things to note: cassia's flavor is far less intense than true cinnamon's and lacks the other's warmth and depth; and cassia is far, far cheaper than the real thing. Hence, DeLong is mistaking what's at work here. In reality, he is seeing the transition from cinnamon to cassia as the dominant player in American cooking, with the concomitant drop in price and rise in volume required to flavor our food.

If you can find some true Vietnamese cinnamon (I order it special from a spice distributor), do the following: bake two batches of sugar cookies,one batch containing Vietnamese cinnamon and the other an equal amount of supermarket-brand "cinnamon." Unless your supermarket is really going for the gold, the "true" cinnamon cookies will have much more cinnamon flavor than the others. Also, as with other ground spices, you should only keep on hand what you plan to use in the next six months or so. Like coffee, ground spices oxidize over time and lose their flavor. If you, like I, have a parent or in-law with a cabinet full of curry powder and giant plastic containers of cinnamon purchased in the early 1980s, do them a favor the next time you're home and throw them out on the sly.

(By the way, the cinnamon sticks available in the USA are all cassia, and should not be ground for use as ground cinnamon. This is the only instance in which grinding your own spices fresh is not recommeneded. The bark of the cassia tree contains varying amounts of flavor depending on where it comes from, and by definintion cinnamon sticks are losers for two reasons: they are most likely to contain fewer essential oils overall; and the flavor will vary depending on which of the bark's layers are ground - with sticks you're getting a lot of just plain sawdust. Not that they don't have their uses, mind, but only as stirrers for your cider drink.)

For the interested, here is a wikipedia entry on cinnamon.

For the really interested, buy On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee, a fascinating and comprehensive one-volume encyclopedia of food, chemistry, and techniques. His discussion of the chemical compounds characteristic of various herbs and spices (e.g. cinammon's flavor deriving in part from cinnamaldehyde and also from small amounts of linalool (lily fragrance) and eugenol (clove), among others) makes creative mixing of flavors easy - just find spices containing complementary compounds and go to town! If you're a geek, that is.

Either way, good luck to Brad DeLong. Although his premises may be wrong, bumping up the "cinnamon" in his recipes will make them more as the writers intended. However, caution is warranted. Too much cinnamon can be unpalatably bitter and harsh tasting, and can have emetic properties besides. I know the former is true for cassia as well, and I really don't care to hear about experiments with the latter.