7. Cinnamon: Your Sweetest-Smelling Spice Is Tree Bark
Ground cinnamon looks like any other powder in the spice rack. A cinnamon stick gives away more of the story: the curled layers are bark. The flavor that makes a kitchen smell like warm pastries begins on a tree.
Cinnamon is harvested from the inner bark of trees in the genus Cinnamomum. Different species supply the spices sold as cinnamon, including Ceylon cinnamon and several types commonly called cassia. Before it becomes a neat quill or a jar of powder, the material has a much more obvious resemblance to something stripped from a woody stem.
The photograph shows cinnamon bark collected in Vietnam, still looking unmistakably like part of a tree. It makes a familiar ingredient feel a little stranger. We are used to eating fruits, seeds, and leaves, but a cinnamon roll also includes a small contribution from a tree’s inner bark.
