CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Cinnamon and Cassia

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What most Canadian shoppers purchase under the label cinnamon is not, in any strict botanical sense, cinnamon at all. The genuine article derives from Cinnamomum verum, a tree cultivated across Sri Lanka and southern India, of which only the slender inner layer of bark holds any commercial value. Once dried, that layer curls into pale, papery quills assembled from several delicate laminations. Dominating the international market instead is cassia, a coarser bark harvested from related species grown throughout southern China and Indonesia. Rather than a bundle of thin quills, cassia consolidates into a single solid tube, and its flavour carries a sharper pungency. Because cultivation costs considerably less, cassia has supplanted the superior bark across world markets.

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That affordability is a recent development. For millennia, cinnamon ranked among antiquity's most coveted commodities, reaching Egypt along trade routes whose origins remained wholly obscure to those receiving the shipments. Embalmers worked the bark into resins applied to the dead, while priests consigned it to temple incense as a ritual offering. Writing in the first century, Pliny the Elder recorded that the finest quills commanded as much as 1,500 denarii per pound. Two centuries later, when the imperial edict fixing maximum prices was promulgated in 301, even the inferior cassia was still valued at roughly five days of a labourer's wages for an equivalent quantity. A seasoning now sold for pennies was once reserved, at extravagant cost, for temples and tombs.

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This extraordinary valuation persisted partly because the merchants who conveyed the bark westward had every incentive to obscure its provenance. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that enormous birds gathered the sticks and built their nests upon inaccessible cliffs. Pliny dismissed the tale as a fabrication devised to protect the price, though he himself possessed no more reliable account of where the plant actually grew. Arab geographers eventually traced the island of origin correctly, and once a Portuguese fleet, driven off its intended course by a storm, reached that island early in the sixteenth century, the intermediaries were swept aside and Portugal secured a monopoly of its own.

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Cultivating the genuine species remains a slow undertaking, still performed largely by hand. Two years after planting, the principal stem is severed at ground level, a cut that induces fresh shoots to emerge from the surviving roots. Once a shoot has darkened and thickened to a diameter of a few centimetres, it is cut, scraped and peeled within the same day. Nothing goes to waste: the inner bark becomes quills or powder, the leftover scrapings are distilled into one essential oil, and the foliage yields a second, destined for the perfume trade. Sri Lanka continues to supply the greater share of the world's genuine cinnamon, notwithstanding the ascendancy of its coarser relative.

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Not given in any of the above paragraphs.