Food of Sri Lanka. Wendy Hutton

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      (Clockwise from top left) cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, coriander, mace, pepper, cardamom, dried red chiles, mustard seeds, cumin, fenugreek, fennel, and turmeric.

      Spice and Other Things Nice

      How cinnamon changed the course of history for Sri Lanka

      Wendy Hutton

      Spices, so important to the Sri Lankan kitchen, actually helped shape the history of the island. The Portuguese arrived at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and it was Sri Lanka's famous cinnamon—the delicately fragrant bark of the Cinnamomum zeylanicum tree native to the island—which became the prime source of revenue for the Europeans.

      Sri Lanka's cinnamon trees, which grew wild on the southern and western coasts of the island, were said to produce the finest cinnamon in the world—and sold for three times the price of cinnamon from other regions. It was said that “it healeth, it openeth and strengtheneth the mawe and digesteth the meat; it is also used against all kinde of pyson that may hurt the hart."

      Cinnamon was still the most important source of revenue by the time the Dutch seized control of the island. They introduced penalties to protect it, making it a capital offence to damage a plant, and to sell or to export the quills or their oil. The Dutch did eventually succeed in cultivating cinnamon, but still relied largely on the wild supply. By the nineteenth century, however, the supremacy of cinnamon was challenged by the cheaper cassia bark grown elsewhere in Asia. The flavor is far less refined, and cassia bark lacks the faint sweetness of true cinnamon, but as the price was so competitive, Sri Lankan cinnamon eventually lost its dominance.

      Cinnamon sticks are in fact dried curls of bark which are removed in thin slivers from the Cinnamomum zeylanicum tree. Cassia, which is often sold as cinnamon, comes from a related species and is darker brown in color with a stronger flavor.

      Cloves and nutmeg, indigenous to the Moluccas in eastern Indonesia, were planted in Sri Lanka by the Dutch who controlled most of the Dutch East Indies. Cardamom, indigenous to both Sri Lanka and southern India, was another valuable spice which flourished in the wetter regions of the country.

      All of Sri Lanka's spices are used to flavor savory dishes such as curries; some also add their fragrance and flavor to desserts and cakes. Spices such as cinnamon therefore command a very important position in Sri Lankan culture, not only as culinary flavorings but also by virtue of their having played such a major role in the country's history.

      Banking on Tea

      Or how the word “Ceylon” was immortalized

      Douglas Bullis

      Aserendipitous twist turned a disastrous blight of coffee rust, which swept through the island's coffee estates in the 1870s, into a tea bonanza: the pretty but unassuming little bush became Sri Lanka's chief export and immortalized the word "Ceylon.” A few tea plants brought from China took very well to the cool, crisp highland climate of the Looloocondrie Estate near Kandy. The island's planters were much relieved to find that tea plants love the same climate that coffee does, and that tea has just as enthusiastic a following all around the world.

      Converting a green leaf into a tasty brown beverage is a quite a story in inorganic chemistry. Yet it is an everyday event in the slab-sided white or aluminum-painted tea factories that dot the flowing hills. These are slatted with louvers to hasten the drying process. Within them the three steps of withering, grinding, and fermenting convert the fresh leaves to a moist, black mass, which is then heated in a stove to reduce to two percent all the moisture originally contained in the leaf.

      Once broken into flakes, tea is graded into names based on the size of the flake. These names have the kind of arcane character often emanating from professionals when talking to each other. In the case of tea, the size categories are pekoe, orange pekoe, broken orange pekoe, broken orange pekoe fannings, and dust—the latter a low quality, inexpensive tea that finds its way into many of the world's teabags.