Incense in The Wind: Best cinnamon incense

Friday, 19 April 2024

Best cinnamon incense

Cinnamon harvest (photo by Tripper)

Cinnamon has a gorgeous fragrance - warm, spicy, inviting, and uplifting; that it makes a wonderful ingredient for incense. Mankind has been beguiled by the fragrance of cinnamon since the dawn of civilization. It was known to the Phoenicians - the great early traders and city builders of the Mediterranean; indeed, the name cinnamon comes from the Phoenician language. And it was known to the Ancient Egyptians, who, according to the Ancient Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, used it during mummification: "they carefully dress the whole body for over thirty days, first with cedar oil and certain other preparations, and then with myrrh, cinnamon, and such spices as have the faculty not only of preserving it for a long time but also of giving it a fragrant odour." It is sometimes named as one of the ingredients of Kyphi, the legendary incense of Egypt. It was a such a prized product that dealers concealed where they obtained it, leading to fantastical stories of the Cinnamon bird which built its nest out of cinnamon sticks.

Cinnamon is made from the inner bark of several related trees: true cinnamon comes from the bark of Cinnamomum verum, also known as Ceylon cinnamon; though there are other cinnamons from the related cassias trees, giving Indonesian, Saigon, and, the most common, Chinese cinnamon, which accounts for almost half of all cinnamon sold. Cinnamon is mainly associated with food flavouring, especially in things like milk puddings, apple pies, pastries, curries, and Chai tea or coffee, though also has various health properties. The active ingredient in cinnamon, and the one mainly responsible for the familiar scent, is cinnamaldehyde, which can be synthesized, but natural cinnamaldehyde is cheap and easy to obtain via steam distillation. If an incense house wanted to cut costs, they would more likely dilute natural cinnamon oil or powder with something like DEP rather than use a synthetic. And they would likely use the cheaper Chinese cinnamon rather than Ceylon, and also use an oil that was distilled from other parts of the tree, like the leaves, rather than the bark.

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