The Mysterious History of Cinnamon

Just want to reiterate I meant to say "cinnamologus", not "cinnamogolus'.

Sri Lanka was called Ceylon, and before that, Serendip. European traders considered the sight of the island as an unexpected and fortunate thing, hence our word 'serendipity.

I lived in this big house with a small Cinnamon tree in front of it. The smell is very strong and can spread throughout the entire street. In fact, not only the trunk but the leaves and berries smell strong too

He who controls the spice, controls the universe.

I would absolutely love to see an ancient man's face at the amount of cinnamon I put in a cup of hot chocolate...

I knew a guy who told me that he heard cinnamon reduces blood sugar, so he was eating cinnamon doughnuts to reduce his blood sugar. No joke.

Mummy have cinnamon in them? I guess that makes them a cinnamon roll

How the first person came to harvest and consume cinnamon would probably be the story of a lunatic. It’s fascinating how so many ancient things we take for granted have such a crazy history. Great video, very interesting.

What I'm hearing here is ground cinnamon is really just sawdust. Pleasant tasting sawdust. I love it. I enjoyed the video and am excited to watch more!

When I visited Sri Lanka I toured what they called a medicinal garden. In it they had lots of spice plants. It was the first I had even thought about where certain spices came from. I saw my first cinnamon tree there. Also the tree that cloves come from, the turmeric plant and many other spices we are familiar with.

In India, cardamom is the spice that is mostly used in sweets and associated with sweets/ sweet drinks like cardamom milk, lassi, chai etc. Cinnamon is mostly used to spice up savory dishes and stews, kormas, etc. Cardamom is also used for savory dishes.

Learning about the history of food makes you appreciate it more and it even tastes better when you think of all that hard work that went into it before consuming

I have the true cinnamon growing in my yard. Just as folk use the bay leaf in cooking the fresh or dried cinnamon leaves work very well also without cutting down the tree.

Is it just me, or does the Cinnamogalus sound like the coolest cereal mascot ever?

imagine meeting someone in the afterlife to learn of their untimely early death and ask what happened and they say “I sold some bootleg cinnamon and they executed me.” lol

I only ingest cinnamon in its unparalleled form... toast crunch

I am from Sri Lanka. Portuguese have never enslaved Sri Lankans. What they did was, encourage people to grow more cinnamon & some times introduced laws (fines) to increase the production. The reason why Portuguese were not able to push Sri Lankans harder was that the central mountains & vast expanse of northern plateau were under Sinhalese kings. Portuguese had only parts of the coastal belt & the Sri Lankan lived in those areas also considered Sinhalese king who was ruling from Sithawaka & Kandy as their king. Every time Portuguese pushed hard, people revolted with the support of Sinhalese kings. They burnt cinnamon storages & slashed cinnamon plantations to ground. Therefore, Portuguese were always careful not to push Sri Lankans too much. Repeated attempts by Portuguese to capture Sinhalese kingdom failed handing them heavy losses. In 1559, Portuguese army was defeated in the battle of Mulleriyawa, making the heaviest loss an European army suffered in Asia until the world war II. There 1600, Portuguese soldiers were slain by Prince Tikiri Bandara's (then aged 16 years, later became the king as Rajasinghe I) Sinhalese army. All three colonials powers who ruled parts of Sri Lanka (finally British took entire country in 1815) approx. 150 years each from 1505 till 1948, never enslaved Sri Lankans. Every time colonial powers push Sri Lankans harder, they revolted violently. Sri Lankans (Sinhalese) never went to work in plantations (tobacco, tea, rubber) under Dutch or British. That is why they bought south Indian Tamils to Sri Lanka to work as plantation workers. Most of the Sri Lankan Tamils (apart from Jaffna) are descendants of those Tamils brought to Sri Lanka by Dutch & British.

As I found from my own reading of Herodatus, the Greco-Romans considered part of India to be inhabited by a form of Ethiopians. Therefore, it's possible they knew the origins of cinnamon then. (book 3.94)

Wow I never knew cinnamon had such fascinating history

Dude you have an awsome knack of coming up with extremely interesting subjects that the average man just simply doesn't think about! Cinnamon!!! Yes! Yes! Who would of though had highly interesting aspects to it?!? You are a success at what you've chosen to do with the Fire of learning brand. Bravo sir. Bravo