Cinnamon’s Secret Identity
It’s a Meat Lover!
By Lindsay Sterling
Learning to cook with exotic
ingredients is exciting, but what I like even better is seeing an immigrant use
an uber-familiar ingredient in a completely new way. It’s both uncomfortable
and invigorating. One minute you think you know something about an ingredient,
and then the next minute you see that you don’t know the half of it. This
happened last month when I was cooking with a Somali woman in the Riverton
neighborhood of Portland.
She was making a dish her family
eats often for lunch: spiced rice topped with beef. In Somali, this is called bariis iyo hilib lo. Translation: rice
and meat beef. She was sauteeing diced onion in oil and adding freshly ground spices:
coriander and cumin, chicken bouillon, and salt, and then she
added cinnamon. If I hadn’t had a social filter, I would have said, “Ah!
What are you doing? Cinnamon is for cinnamon buns, not beef dishes!”
This wasn’t
the first time I couldn’t believe what an immigrant was doing with cinnamon.
The Afghani woman had put cinnamon in her lamb. The Indians put cinnamon in
their prawn curry, chicken biryani, and chicken tandoori. The Iraqi woman
boiled a chicken with a cinnamon stick. The Eritrean woman put cinnamon in the
spice mixture that went in her spicy chicken stew. So this has basically been the
trend. Immigrants put cinnamon in their meat dishes and I, the American, freak
out. At home, one of my hands has to force the other to put the cinnamon in
these dishes.
Why am I so resistant to cinnamon
going savory? As I’ve learned from cooking and tasting these immigrant dishes,
cinnamon by itself is not sweet. It is mildly spicy, aromatic and drying. It activates
the middle of the palate, and works well with other middle flavors like cloves,
cumin and meat. In the Indian and Eritrean dishes, the cinnamon has a
stabilizing or grounding effect on the zippy heat of super-hot chilis. In the Somali
beef and rice dish, the cinnamon, cumin, coriander and chicken broth lend
substance and body to the meal. It’s so much better with spices than plain!
For context, cinnamon was around long
before the American psyche. According to one theory, traders were floating
rafts of bark from Indonesia to east Africa as early as 2000 B.C. Then from
east Africa, cinnamon traveled up through ports in the Red Sea and over land to
Alexandria, from where it was shipped to other ports along the Mediterranean. Cinnamon
traders were likely Arabs, but after 1518, the Portuguese, Dutch, and English cut
out the Arab middlemen in the cinnamon trade by going themselves to an island off
the coast of India (Sri Lanka), where cinnamon grew like gangbusters. Almost as
soon as Western Europeans got their hands on their own direct supply of
cinnamon, they also started producing their own supplies of a new ingredient, sugar,
in the new world. From what I understand, it was right then that the two sides
of cinnamon diverged: sweet and savory.
I’m humbled to realize that cinnamon
had something like a 3500-year culinary history before sugar was even
discovered! Cinnamon Toast Crunch is just the most recent tip of the iceberg. Underneath,
I’m pretty sure, are millennia of cinnamon and meat.
