An interview with ... Nira Wickramasinghe, author of Cinnamon: A History of Taste and Empire

I've been connected to cinnamon my whole life without realising it. Growing up in Paris, I ate it in prawn dishes my parents cooked, a taste of Sri Lanka, where our family was from. The idea for this book came later still when I lived and worked in Colombo as a historian, I started noticing cinnamon everywhere: the ‘Cinnamon Gardens’ police station stood right across from the National Archives where I did most of my research. After I moved to the Netherlands to take up a professorship, I encountered traditional Dutch sweets made with cinnamon; in fact a whole culture that uses this spice daily, but has no idea Dutch people once fought wars to control where it grew. It became clear there was a deeper story to be told, and a global one.

I spent quite some time on research for this book consulting special collections and colonial archives in London, the Hague and Colombo and online sources that have been digitised. Much of the secondary material was easily accessible in university libraries. I was especially fortunate to be able to use the Princeton University library, and during my sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study benefit from the amazing help extended by the library staff at the IAS for whom nothing was impossible. 

I also visited cinnamon cultivation areas in Sri Lanka where the best cinnamon is found and the fantastic cinnamon museum in Mirissa. What I enjoyed most was reading around the topic, on topics such as scent, food or the plague.

One of the chapters I most enjoyed researching was the second, Scent: The Ancient World and its Echoes about the sweet aroma of cinnamon. I was fascinated to discover that in classical antiquity, cinnamon's spiritual quality was tied not only to rituals of death but also became an olfactory symbol of God's holiness; Christian saints were believed to smell of cinnamon and aspalathus. 

In the following chapter, I traced how cinnamon came to be embraced as a potent medicine during the age of the plague, and how it has a long history as a drug in both traditional Chinese and Indian medicine. Researching the book also uncovered the hidden currents of imperial rivalry that ran through cinnamon's history. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese were stealing trees from Dutch territories, transplanting cinnamon taken from Sri Lanka and India to Brazil, their largest colony, while various European collectors and botanists made foolhardy, largely unsuccessful attempts to grow it in more temperate climates. 

But my happiest find of all was a 1927 newsreel of the solemn preparation of a giant King's Christmas pudding in London, in which cinnamon from Ceylon was one of seventeen ingredients, ceremonially carried in by a Sinhalese man.

It’s really conceived as a book for each and every curious person who is interested not only in the spectacular narrative of empire, but in these smaller, stranger, more human stories of scent and sanctity, of food, medicine and botanical rivalry that unfold from the Americas to Europe, the Middle East and Asia. 

One fragrant tree bark can carry the weight of global history. So the book is for a global readership because it explains why a spice made of the bark of a tree became so valuable that it reshaped economies, drove colonisation, and depended on coerced labor from cinnamon peelers in Sri Lanka. 

It also tells a story of the beauty of culinary crossroads, of shared medicinal practices, of perfumes and scents consumed by people in many parts of the world. However modestly, this book aims at kindling a little hope in the difficult times we are living through.

Definitely in cooking both savoury and sweet dishes, especially in a Sri Lankan prawn/isso curry but also in a French minimalist tarte aux pommes where powdered cinnamon and brown sugar are sprinkled over the chopped apples before baking the tart. The entire house then smells of cinnamon!