Cream scalloped bowls, set of six
Six deep bowls with a scalloped rim and forty years of wear along the edge.
$30
Ceylon cinnamon quills
$18
True cinnamon — pale, layered and brittle. Not the thick red curl sold as cassia.
Materials & dimensions
- True Ceylon cinnamon quills, 100g
- Undyed cotton tie
- Kraft sleeve
8 × 4 × 14 cm · 180 g
Care
Airtight and dark. Snap a quill rather than sawing it — it is meant to shatter. The broken pieces are for grinding; the neat lengths are for infusing.
Shipping & duties
Ceylon cinnamon quills cannot be posted to United States. Its plant material is held at the border. Everything else in the shop ships there normally.
Import duties and taxes are set by United States, not by us. They are not included above, and your carrier collects them on delivery.
The story
Most of what is sold as cinnamon in North America and much of Europe is cassia: a different tree, a thicker bark, a single hard curl, and a blunt heat. True cinnamon — Cinnamomum verum, which is native here and took the island's name into three European languages — is pale tan, brittle enough to crush between your fingers, and rolled from many paper-thin layers into a quill like a cigar.
It is peeled by hand. The shrub is coppiced, the shoots are cut, the outer bark is scraped away with a curved brass knife, and the inner bark is worked loose in long strips that are then nested inside each other and left to dry overnight, shrinking into one another as they go. A peeler is paid on the length and quality of the quill and there is no machine anywhere in the process.
The taste is the point of the difference: sweeter, more floral, far less aggressive. It also contains a fraction of the coumarin that cassia does, which matters if you cook with it often.
Chandra Kumari
Kosgoda, Southern Province · working since 1997
