Cinnamon Peeling | Finding The True Spice With Michael Ondaatje

No other thing, except perhaps Buddhism itself, water technology or Sri Lanka’s island status, has had so marked an impact on the country as cinnamon. But what did Michael Ondaatje have to say about it that will set you free?

It may seem an especially exhausting form of attention-seeking to start a talk about cinnamon with sex, but bear with me.

It’s not how it seems. You have not wandered, against your better judgment, into the torrid pages of the Daily Mail. You are instead merely on the cusp of a particularly apt – if random - metaphor.

Michael Ondaatje’s poem, The Cinnamon Peeler, is so sublimely perfect that it easily breaks free of the interminable academic bonds that seek to tie it to gender studies or post-colonial literature, or to any of the other military camps of academia.

It appears to be a poem about love, sex, romance, desire, risk, and even a pinch of pain.

But listen to it now and imagine instead that you are the cinnamon peeler’s wife, and that the cinnamon peeler is actually Sri Lanka.

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler

I would ride your bed

And leave the yellow bark dust

On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek

You could never walk through markets

without the profession of my fingers

floating over you. The blind would

stumble certain of whom they approached

though you might bathe

under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh

at this smooth pasture

neighbour to you hair

or the crease

that cuts your back. This ankle.

You will be known among strangers

as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you

before marriage

never touch you

--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.

I buried my hands

in saffron, disguised them

over smoking tar,

helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once

I touched you in the water

and our bodies remained free,

you could hold me and be blind of smell.

you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it

to be the lime burner's daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in the act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched

your belly to my hands

in the dry air and said

I am the cinnamon

Peeler's wife. Smell me.

It has always seemed to me to be a poem about the island Ondaatje left when he emigrated to Canada, but to which he returned in almost all his writing as assuredly as a bee returns to pollen.

For Sri Lanka is like that. Like a cinnamon bush, it looks perfectly regular, a mere green shrub, as well-behaved as most shrubs, keeping itself to itself. But scratch the skin just a bit, and you release much more than the closeted scent, dust and colour of the plant. You release yourself, too. You are even given to broadcasting it – smell me!

This little island gets to you that way, should you spend any time here. Once the normal tribulations of daily life have been packed away into their boring little box, you are left with the distinctive, enticing, complicated, exhilarating sense of encountering an extension of yourself that keeps your mind and soul busy till death. Or even beyond that, if the Buddhists are right, and you return to the island as something else. Whether other cultures elsewhere in the world have items, plants, or places that unlock something as unexpected and precious as this is debatable. Certainly, I have not found anything similar in New York, Watford, Singapore, Dubai, or Andalucia.

Geography is almost as strange as other people – beyond calculation. It is possible, I suppose, that something similar might occur in Budapest or Bangor. I am just grateful to have found it at all. And found it here.

That the spice has such a great lure is less of a surprise to history. “He who controls the spice,” observed Frank Herbert, messianically, in the novel Dune, “controls the universe.” No other thing, except perhaps Buddhism itself, water technology or Sri Lanka’s island status, has had so marked an impact on the country as this miraculous spice.

Its glittering commercial allure drew in monopolistic colonisers, and the consequences were to remake the island - utterly. Lured by cinnamon.

First came the 15th-century Portuguese, who broke the Arab traders' monopoly and took over the Maritime Silk Trade – until, that is, the Dutch stepped in.

The Dutch brought a draconian commercial mindset, establishing Sri Lanka as a de facto cinnamon estate with stringent laws to maximise what would become one of the world's most profitable monopolies. Huge fines and deportation were inflicted on anyone who cut down a cinnamon tree without permission.

When the British arrived in 1796, the cinnamon monopoly fell into their hands – but only momentarily. British control of Sri Lanka coincided with the natural dissolution of the global cinnamon monopoly.

But it dissipated in a way that merely made things more interesting, for by then the profit-minded vendors of cinnamon had branded something else as cinnamon - Cinnamomum cassia, a cousin of the plant then living mostly in China, but soon to be planted right across southern East Asia. It was cheaper, faster and easier to grow and make money from. It was almost like Ceylon Cinnamon, too. Almost – but not quite.

Ceylon Cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum) is a plant that you can only find in Sri Lanka. It has an arresting, different flavour to Chinese cinnamon. It is sweeter, more subtle, and less bitter than Cinnamon cassia. It has a softer texture and a lighter colour. As one food writer put it: “It is the flavour equivalent of being hugged by your grandmother.”

Of the 80 chemical compounds both varieties contain, there is little to compare in how well they are known to improve insulin levels, increase blood sugar uptake, reduce cholesterol, and act against bacteria and fungi, even to the point of inhibiting tumour growth. Both stop the buildup of tau, a substance that can lead to Alzheimer’s disease. The way in which they metabolise inhibits the progression of Parkinson’s Disease. Their polyphenols detoxify enzymes, protecting against the growth of cancer cells. And both stimulate calorie burning. But where they differ is in their inclusion of coumarin, a compound that causes liver damage. Compared to Chinese cinnamon, Sri Lankan cinnamon has extremely low levels of this dangerous chemical - 250 times less, to be exact. It is therefore the only sure variety to use for health benefits.

We grow it here on the Flame Tree Estate, our climate making it the perfect spot for the plant, for the growing spice likes it hot but not blistering – a steady temperature of around 25˚C to 32˚C - and its demand for plenty of moisture means it is a firm fixture in the central hilly area of the country – in Galagedera, in fact.

It is grown most easily from seeds, 3-4 per pot, and planted out about 4 feet apart in these clusters, whose competing roots ensure a beautifully shrubby plant, best able to give off many branches to peel, and so limit the dangers of any one plant racing to become a fifteen metre tall tree.

Although today it is typically grown in large, well-managed monoculture estates, like a sapphire, its best mounting is when it is surrounded by many other things, an approach that led long ago on this island to the development of a unique form of gardening– the Kandyan gardening technique.

This variety of gardening mimics a tropical rainforest.

In spaces of an acre or less, taller trees are interplanted with shorter ones. The resulting fusion garden typically includes jackfruit, mahogany, mango, teak, and, of course, as many spice plants as can be squeezed in. It fosters an astonishing biodiversity - a self-sustaining ecosystem that drives up the health of the soil and the resilience of the plants to disease. Erosion is minimised; fallen leaves keep soil temperatures at favourable levels and improve fertility. And planted in its sunnier spots is cinnamon, the greatest of the island’s species.

We prune our own bushes here, although it was common not so long ago to hire wandering groups of specialist cinnamon peelers who all came from the same caste. In the time of the kings, and especially in the Kandyan kingdom, some castes specialised in just about everything, from washing clothes to preparing temple flowers. The caste that specialised in cinnamon peeling was the Salagama (or Chalia) caste. They originated in South India, arriving here as early as the thirteenth century and settling largely around Galle, with strategic village outposts as far north as Kandy and Chilaw.

To watch them prune a cinnamon bush is like watching Yehudi Menuhin play Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor.

Our home-spun approach is infinitely more modest – but it gets the job done.

Pruning starts every year at about 18 months into the plant’s life, with cross-branches removed and the plants kept to a height of around 3 metres. Twice-yearly harvesting occurs after about 3 years.

It is simple enough if you are merely after large cinnamon scrolls. However, the Salagama peelers are masters at peeling the branches to a target width, with different widths determining the final grade of the spice. Thirteen different grades are recognised, determined largely by the diameter of the quill. The highest, known as Alba, has quills less than 6mm in diameter.

Here, we merely cut a straight, young branch from the tree and trim off small leaves, shoots, or knots to leave a smooth, clean stick.

Next, we scrape the outer bark to remove the rough, bitter greyish-brown layer and reach the heart of the spice – the yellowish-green or light-brown inner layer.

Stage three is to loosen the inner bark with a smooth, heavy object (a copper stick is best). Rolling bruises the inner bark and loosens it from the hardwood core underneath.

Finally, you can slice & peel. You make a straight, vertical slice down the length of the bark with a sharp knife, cutting just deep enough to hit the wood core. Then you slip your knife blade under the cut edge of the bark and pry it away from the wood. The inner bark should peel off in long, beautiful sheets or tubes.

And lastly, of course, you dry it – leaving the peeled sheets in indirect sunlight so they naturally curl into cinnamon sticks, or "quills".

Keep Michael Ondaatje and the Cinnamon Peeler in mind as you do all this, though. For you are not just knocking up an ingredient for the kitchen in a sort of pick-your-own way. You are on the cusp of telling anyone you might randomly encounter: Smell Me – for you are well on your way to becoming a sort of human Monarch Butterfly, rearranging your every organ, limb, and nervous system to transition from leaf-munching caterpillar into what Juan Olivarez said was “one of the treasures God left on this earth.”

You touched

your belly to my hands

in the dry air and said

I am the cinnamon

Peeler's wife. Smell me.

That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.