Cinnamon
Cinnamon is the holiest of spices. Just ask God. Why
else would he command Moses to sanctify the ark of the Testimony (and just about
everything else) in sacred anointing oil, made with no fewer than 250 shekels of
cinnamon? God said, and I quote, “You shall consecrate them so they will
be most holy, and whatever touches them will be holy.”
Interestingly, God’s early vision
of cinnamon as the great purifier has since been adopted by science, which
values its astringent, anti-infective, and antifungal properties. These, in
addition to its sweetness, warmth, and woodsy fragrance once caused it to be
valued more dearly than gold. The Roman Emperor Nero ordered a year's supply of
cinnamon be burnt on his wife’s funeral pyre: a flagrant squandering of
wealth which of course, shocked the known world and in my opinion cost him his
reputation, fiddle or no.
Like many
things holy and/or valuable, cinnamon was at the heart of centuries’ worth
of exploration and war. It is native to very few countries; China was an early
producer, but it was the small island of Sri Lanka, just south of India, which
suffered the world’s hunger for the spice. Poor Sri Lanka was conquered
first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch, followed closely by the French and
the English in quick succession. Each of these nations in turn did their best
to commandeer the world’s supply of cinnamon, going so far as to seek and
destroy any other crop besides their own. God, I’m sure, was not pleased.
I had a mini-rite of cinnamon in my
kitchen this week. Of course, lacking an ark of the Testimony of my own, I used
it to anoint some chicken instead, but I’m fairly sure that every exposed
surface was consecrated. Having whipped up a mixture of olive oil, cinnamon,
cayenne pepper, and sugar, I poured it over some plump bone-in chicken breasts
and let them marinate overnight (so they’d be extra-sacred by
dinner-time).
If you’re feeling not-so-holy, you could
always substitute cassia. The two are closely related and, once ground, nearly
indistinguishable. In fact, if you live in the U.S., chances are you’re
already using cassia - not because we Americans are heathens undeserving of the
holy Cinnamomum zeylanicum, but because that’s normally what we’re
sold under the name cinnamon. You can tell the difference between the two more
easily in stick form: true cinnamon quills are curled like a telescope, while
cassia quills curl inward from both sides, like a scroll. Connoisseurs will be
able to tell which is which even when ground. True cinnamon is pale tan in
color with a warm, sweet flavor, whereas ground cassia is a reddish brown,
slightly coarser in texture, with a bitter edge, stronger flavor and a more
aromatic bouquet.
After the chicken
went into the oven to roast, I prepared some harissa sauce, a spicy red-pepper
sauce from Tunisia. I charred four red peppers under the broiler, popped them
into a big ziplock bag and let them steam until their skins got loose and baggy.
Once peeled, I chopped them up and pureed them in the food processor with some
roasted garlic, toasted coriander and caraway seeds, red pepper flakes, sugar,
salt and pepper. The harissa presents a vibrant orangey-red accompaniment to
the deeply browned cinnamon chicken and sets your taste-buds singing. All who
partook sensed the divine, and with anointed chicken in our bellies and hymns on
our tongues, we too were purified.
Posted: Fri - September 3, 2004 at 05:14 PM