Ceylon Cinnamon (Alba Grade)

The most useful thing to know about cinnamon is that most of it is not cinnamon. The hard, dark-red, thick-barked sticks sold almost everywhere are cassia. Ceylon cinnamon, Cinnamomum verum — the botanical name literally means true — is a different tree, native to Sri Lanka, and produces a bark so thin it shatters between the fingers.

You can tell them apart without tasting either. A Ceylon quill is under a tenth of a millimetre thick and rolls into a single spiral of fine layers; cassia is nearer a millimetre and a half and curls from both edges towards the middle. Sri Lanka's export development board puts the coumarin content of Ceylon at roughly 0.004%, against around 5% for cassia — about 250 times less. That gap is the whole argument for Ceylon.

Alba is the finest of the four Ceylon grades — Alba, Continental, Mexican, Hamburg. It is taken from the innermost bark of young shoots and cut to 5-inch sticks, 5 – 9 millimetres across. It is the scarcest grade because it demands the youngest wood and the steadiest hands: a peeler who tears the bark has downgraded it in a second. Alba fetches about twice the price of the coarser grades.

The southern belt around Galle and Matara has grown and peeled it for centuries, and trees are cut for bark from about their fourth year. The work is still manual — branches soaked to soften the bark, the rough outer layer scraped away, the inner bark lifted off in sheets by a peeler judging thickness against the bones of their own fingers. In Sri Lanka the craft has passed down for generations within the Salagama and Hakuru communities, and experienced peelers are becoming scarce.

In the kitchen. Ceylon is delicate where cassia is loud. Simmer a whole quill in chai, milk or a dessert syrup; it will crumble under a rolling pin if you would rather grind it fresh.

A note on honesty: this is the one spice in our catalogue that is not Indian, and we say so on the pack. An honest address is worth more than a convenient one.