Cinnamon

There are so many different spices available to us now, from so many different countries across the world, and so many recipes telling us how to use them. We have shelves of different spices, because we do a lot of cooking at home, sweet and savoury dishes. If we see an unusual spice or something we haven’t tried before we nearly always buy it then find a recipe to use it – and also if we see a recipe we like then we try and find the right spices to go with it!

Cinnamon comes from the bark of a particular tree and is used in curls of dried bark or ground to a powder; it has been a popular flavour from very early times, Ancient Egyptians, Ancient Hebrews, Ancient Greeks, and the actual word has been in the English language since the 1400’s. The trees are coppiced, which means they are allowed to grow for two years then cut back and new shoots will begin to grow.

I use cinnamon in combination with other spices, but I actually don’t like it on its own or if it dominates a dish. For some reason it seems to be very popular at the moment; I keep finding that I’m eating something which to me (but not usually anyone else) seems overpoweringly cinnamony. We bought some mustard he other day which was advertised as Scotch bonnet chilli mustard… yes it was quite hot, but there was little flavour of mustard because it was overwhelmed my cinnamon. None of the rest of the family could taste it, and I had to look on the list of ingredients to check for myself that I wasn’t just imagining it… and there it was, cinnamon, in mustard! Bleagh!