Kurundu – the spice of life

November 10, 2015, 7:44 pm 

"You touched

your belly to my hands

in the dry air and said

I am the cinnamon

peeler’s wife. Smell me"

- The Cinnamon Peeler - Michael Ondaatji

By Siri Ipalawatte - Australia

In his Heroides, the Augustan poet relates the agony undergone by Helen of Sparta as she tries to decide whether to abandon home, reputation, and family so as to run off with Paris, her smooth-talking and handsome house guest.

"You will go through Trojan towns, a great queen, and the common people will believe that a new goddess is among them. Wherever you are the flame with offer up cinnamon and a sacrificial victim with strike the bloody earth."

The precise force of the offer was unmistakable. It worked, and Helen of Sparta became Helen of Troy. As Paris promised Helen, cinnamon was burned in incense and added to the flame in the temple brazier during the performance of religious rituals.

When Nero’s consort, Poppaea, died from a kick he dealt to her stomach – according to historian Suetonius they had a row after he came late from the races – her body was cremated on a colossal pyre of cinnamon – a symbolic status and a gesture to represent the depth of his sadness.

Where the cinnamon of Nero and Paris was grown is a matter of some doubt: but the tree that bears the spice, Cinnamomum Zeylanicum, which derived from the Hebraic and Arabic term ‘ammom’ meaning fragrant plant, is a small, evergreen plant, native to Sri Lanka where the situation and climate are so exactly suited to it that none so fine and delicately aromatic has been found elsewhere. Although tea has long ousted cinnamon as Sri Lanka’s most famous export, it was cinnamon that placed Sri Lanka on the list of countries the colonial powers wanted to conquer. Among the first to mention cinnamon in Sri Lanka was Ibn Batuta who visited the island in the mid fourteenth century. He landed at Puttalam and found the shore covered with cinnamon wood, which the merchants of Malabar (the present Kerala) transported without any other price than a few articles of clothes given as presents to the king.

It was a drab evening in November 15, 1505 in the vast Indian Ocean. Captain Dom Lourenco de Almeida stood proudly on the quarterdeck of the flagship that belonged to the fleet of nine vessels he commanded. The fleet was bound for the Maldives at the express wish of his father on a specific mission but destiny decreed otherwise. The fleet was caught in a fierce storm, blown off course, and eventually anchored off Colombo. Dharma Parakramabahu VIII, the king of Kotte, sent emissaries to greet the visitors, and they were received at court shortly thereafter. Parakramabahu, made insecure by threats to his kingdom from within Sri Lanka, was quick to come to an arrangement with the Portuguese – especially in consideration of their artillery – for protection in exchange for 400 bahars (a bahar in the cinnamon trade weighted 744 Dutch pounds) of cinnamon annually.

For more than a century after they took control of Sri Lanka in 1658, the Dutch harvested only wild cinnamon. Then, during the tenure of Governor Wilhelm Falck (1765-1785), being unable to rely on the quality of cinnamon collected from the wild, the Dutch had begun planting it. The Dutch commissioned a Swedish botanist, Carl Peter Thunberg, to make a study of cinnamon in Sri Lanka. After years of travelling in the East, Thunberg resided in Sri Lanka between 4 January 1777 and 14 March 1778. Following his return to Europe he published a two-volume account of his experiences and devoted several chapters to his stay in Ceylon.

In his study, Thunberg listed ten varieties of cinnamon grown in Sri Lanka; rasa kurundu, nai kurundu, capuru kurundu, kahata kurundu, sevel kurundu, davul kurundu, nica kurundu, kathuru kurundu, mal kurundu, and tom-pat kurundu. He wrote how the cinnamon trees were naturally spread around the forest with the help of birds who dumped the pits after eating its fruits.

As a result of this initiative ‘cinnamon gardens’ sprang up in and around Colombo; however, it was under Governor Van de Graaff that the cinnamon plantations really took off. Through rewards he managed to excite many headmen into cultivating the tree. Even military and civil servants of the Dutch East India Company began planting trees. When the Batavia administration wrote to Colombo in 1789 that the expenses for the cinnamon gardens in Ceylon were growing out of hand, and instructed the government to delay the work for the time being, Van de Graaff, on the advice of his Mahamudaliyar, Nicholaas Dias Abeysinghe, decided to hand over the company’s plantations to the cinnamon peelers in small plots. In 1793, fifteen hundred deeds were printed for this purpose and given to Salagama caste.

So unjustly rigid was the monopoly on cinnamon maintained by the Dutch Government that neither the European nor native proprietors of the land were allowed to iestroy, cut, touch the bark, or pluck the leaves of any cinnamon plant that grew on their properties. They were also compelled to give notice to the superintendent of cinnamon plantations when a cinnamon sprouted from the earth or severe penalties were imposed. From Old Dutch records the British learned that for more than one hundred years, the revenue derived annually from the sale of cinnamon was seldom less than four hundred thousand English pounds. With a strictly enforced export monopoly, they ensured that world consumption stayed almost at around 182,000 kg from 1691 to the end of Dutch rule in 1796.

When the British wrested control of the island from the Dutch in 1798, they continued the monopoly of cinnamon exports, which was eventually abandoned only in 1833 when it became clear that free trade could no longer be prevented.

Cinnamon is harvested every six months during the monsoon season. The moisture makes it easier to remove the cinnamon from the branches. The cinnamon trees are cut just above the ground and from the stump a new tree will grow ready for harvesting in another two years. The trees stumps have distinct reddish shoots whilst the mature trees are littered with acorn-like nuts, which are replanted to produce more trees.

"This is a physically demanding job, which requires the precision of a surgeon’s hand." Mendis looked at me and continued; " I learned the craft from my father and grand father". This was when I visited my friend’s ten-acre cinnamon plantation in Beliatta last year.

Mendis belongs to a special and ancient caste of people – the Salagama – that has for generations practised this art in the southwest of Sri Lanka, a group that is distinctly different from the cultivators. The Salagama (or Chalias as the Portuguese called them) formed the cinnamon peeling caste and collected and prepared the cinnamon for the Dutch as part of their ‘corvee labour’. Their department, called Mahabadda, was put under control of a Dutch officer, the captain of cinnamon (kapitein der kaneel).

And I patiently watched the amazing process: the shoots are first scraped off with a semi-circular blade, and then the stick is rubbed with a brass rod –

Pittala polla

– to loosen the bark, which then is split with a curved knife with a blade of copper two and a half inches long –

Kokaththa

– and peeled off. Mendis seated on the ground gently removed lengths of bark from the branch in one piece. The peeled bark is telescoped one into another forming a quill about 107 centimetres long and filled with trimmings of the same quality bark to maintain a cylindrical shape.

He told me that after four or five days drying, the quills are rolled on a board to tighten the fillings and then placed in subdued sunlight for further drying. Finally, they are bleached with sulphur dioxide and sorted into grades. The peelers cut the cinnamon into different sizes depending on the price of the different qualities on the world market. Sri Lanka is the world’s leading source of cinnamon, accounting for about 60 per cent of the total global output.

While peeled cinnamon is the most famous product, oil extracted from the cinnamon leaves has become a lucrative industry in recent years. The cinnamon leaves are dried in a barn until golden brown. Steam is then put through the leaves in copper vats, and the oil-infused vapour rises into a pipe network, which is cooled in water tanks to return the vapour to liquid.

The golden cinnamon oil collects on the surface and is siphoned off via a series of buckets and then bottled. Sri Lankan cinnamon produces a scent far superior to that of cinnamon cultivated in other countries such as Madagascar, Burma and Indonesia; as a consequence Sri Lanka cinnamon continues even today to command the highest price.

In addition to its long history of use as a sweet spice used in cooking and as a perfume, cinnamon also has medicinal applications. Cinnamon contains a number of powerful antioxidant compounds that help to prevent premature destruction of healthy cells in the body. Studies have shown that cinnamon possesses anti-microbial properties that help to reduce the risk of food-borne diseases caused by bacteria, but the medicinal use of cinnamon gaining most attention these days concerns blood sugar stabilization.

One recent study at Joslin Diabetes Centre in Boston, which included 10 investigations and a total of 543 patients, was published earlier this year in the Annals of Family Medicine. "Doses in the studies ranged from 120 milligrams a day to six grams sprinkling cinnamon on food might help to control a diabetic's blood sugar," says Emmy Suhl, a certified diabetes educator and nutritionist at Joslin Diabetes Centre in Boston.

"If you decide to use a lot of cinnamon, you do need to use Sri Lankan cinnamon because it will lower your risk of liver damage," says Angela Ginn, who is an education coordinator at the University of Maryland Centre for Diabetes and Endocrinology in Baltimore.

In 2014, Sri Lanka produced 18,250 metric tonnes of cinnamon and exported 13,864 metric tonnes; the major importers were Mexico, USA, Colombia, Peru and Germany.