{Cortex Cinnamomi}
Cinnamon is strongly connected to sweet dishes in our mind, from Christmas bakery over desserts to stewed fruit and hot drinks like punch and mulled wine.
In the Asian cuisine cinnamon is an ingredient of curries and meat dishes.
The cinnamon tree is native to the tropics and is cultivated particularly on Sri Lanka and in parts of India. Of the over 275 types only five are suitable for cinnamon production. In Southern China cinnamon has been used for over 4000 years, in Egypt it has a usage history of over 3000 years.
For cinnamon production fine shoots of the tree are peeled: Only the delicate inner bark layers are used. Several such bark pieces that have been scraped off are telescoped into one another and on drying in the sun they curl into the well-known quills. These quills are then cut into pieces of the desired length. Apart from quills the food industry uses cinnamon oil as well – for example in chewing gum.
