Recipes with cinnamon

Cinnamon is a dried bark, and that origin explains how it behaves: its scent is carried by a volatile oil that escapes with prolonged heat and open air. Ground, it loses interest within months; in stick form it keeps for years. Nor is it a sweet spice by nature — northern Europe is what filed it under cakes.

The split is clean. On the savoury side, Algerian chorba frik uses it as the base note of a soup of vegetables and cracked wheat, Moroccan vegetable pastilla sets it against salt and almond, and South African pampoenkoekies sit on the border between the two. On the sweet side it is often the only aromatic: Swedish kanelbullar roll it into the dough with butter, Portuguese arroz doce and pastéis de nata dust it on at the end, Norwegian lefse mixes it with sugar, and Guatemalan chickpeas in panela syrup steep it in the syrup. Moroccan orange and cinnamon salad holds both logics at once.

The practical rule that follows: a stick goes into the liquid at the start and infuses, while powder is added at the end or just before serving. Powder boiled for a long time turns dusty in the mouth and bitter, and gives nothing extra in the way of scent.