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A “Conversation” with Cinnamon Print E-mail
Wednesday, 16 March 2011

When I attended a “Deep Feast Writing Workshop,” conducted by writing instructor and cookbook author Crescent Dragonwagon, she led us through a journaling exercise called the “Ira Progoff Dialoguing Technique.” Beginning with “Stepping Stones,” the exercise allows the writer to isolate particular events that served as milestones along a path. Ultimately, the process affords the writer an opportunity to actually “dialogue” with the subject in the form of a conversation. Following is a series of stepping stones and a conversation I had with cinnamon; I have endeavored to type it up exactly as I wrote it out during the workshop.


The Stepping Stones:
(From Cinnamon’s perspective)
1.) I am bark, curled around the wood of a tree in the tropical highlands. I am hard and smooth, thicker at the base of the tree and thinner where I find my way out onto the surface of the new green wood at the tips of every branch.

2.) My true nature, I have come to realize is not woody at all, rather it is simultaneously crystalline and oleic. My essence, once it is atomized, released form its bark sarcophagus, as it is every time the tree is scratched, broken or burned, is that of an essential oil. I am perfume.

3.) I am heat too. I warm the souls and the sensory receptors of those who come into contact with me. I have fire in my soul, but not explosive fire – rather I am the glowing ember on the hearth of a home that provides shelter in a cold, wet world. I am the blanket, the cup of hot chocolate, the skin of a lover.

4.) I have been stolen. I have been ripped from my ancestral home, packed into the cargo holds of a countless ships, traded for other forms of wealth, sold down the river as harshly as any human cargo has ever been sold. And yet, even violated, I am serene. I emit the same warm glow that gold produces when it is pulled from the earth, refined by fire and passed around between the greedy simian hands of the people who covet me.

5.) A Roman emperor once collected so many parts of my body that they towered above his head, spread out in a great cauldron that was wider than it was tall. He thought that by burning my flesh he might appease his gods, pay penance for his sins, his acts of cruelty so heinous that not even all of my body thrown into the sun could ever rectify.

6.) Mostly I am collected by more innocent sorts. They gather me up in reasonable amounts, grind my bark cells to release my inner oily fire and fold me into other foods; grains of wheat, dollops of butter, crystalline piles of refined sugar from cane and beet. I become the dominant aroma. Foods that include me assume my name: Cinnamon rolls.

7.) More than an actual substance, I feel I am become an idea in the minds of those who adore me.

The Stepping Stones:
(From My perspective)

1.) My earliest memories of cinnamon involve cinnamon toast. Mixed with ground sugar, the cinnamon was sprinkled over the surface of bread which had been toasted on one side only and buttered on the untoasted side. My recollections of this treat have as much to do with texture as they do with taste or aroma. The crunch of the toasted side of the bread contrasts delightfully with the tenderness of the untoasted side. And the flavor of the butter and sugar is quietly trumped by the fragrance of the cinnamon, a single whiff of which can bring back the whole experience.

2.) Cinnamon; the very word evokes comfort and home. And how powerfully does that smell evoke my childhood attempts to maximize pleasures. My sisters and I once tried to produce the ultimate uber cinnamon toast by cooking up a paste of cinnamon, sugar and butter in a saucepan on the stove. We plastered the stuff onto a weak slice of factory-made bread and almost made ourselves sick biting through the thick layer of sugar, brown as chocolate with so much cinnamon.

3.) Cinnamon rolls I sing your praises. You are innocent and devoid of any mystery or pretense and yet, your very shape, the coil, is symbolic of infinity, a concept too mysterious to grasp at all. The evocative scent you generate is not innocent, not really. There is musk and pure untempered lust in there with you.

4.) Cinnamon ice cream is a conundrum that evokes all the paradox of any mystery of any faith. It is simultaneously hot and cold, soft and hard, smooth and yet ever so slightly abrasive. Heating cinnamon in milk before transforming that milk into custard, the powdery stuff becomes a mucilaginous mass of slime impossible to reconcile with any notions we may have harbored about the stuff before we tried to infuse its essence into milk.

5.) And speaking of infusing milk with the essence of cinnamon, consider if you will the wonder of chai. Make a syrup of strong black tea, cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper, ginger and vanilla. Make it as strong as you like and sweet, sweet, sweet. Then soften the syrup, dilute with hot, hot milk.

6.) I have tried on more than one occasion to bring cinnamon to the table in the form of a savory dish; and more often than not, this has been a disaster. But I still think of a fragrant rice dish…

The Conversation Itself: 

Me: Cinnamon, I address you because you are the ultimate in romantic foodstuffs. I feel that if I can say anything new and meaningful about you then I can say something about any food.

Cinnamon: But I am corny, over-used, over-done. I am become cliché.

Me: So much the better. You are everywhere in foodwriting. Why shouldn’t a fish write about water? It is after all, important stuff for a fish.

Cinnamon: You don’t really know me. You have never come to see me in my home country. You’ve never visited my tropical home. You don’t even know what my leaves look like. You can’t imagine how I am when I am alive, when birds peck at my bark and flutter through my branches.

Me: I’m sorry. I should rectify that. I should fly to Vietnam, to India, to China, to Indonesia. I should find you in the wild, break off a piece of you and put you in my mouth.

Cinnamon: You and every other ape. You all want to consumer me. But even if you find me where I live you will not touch me. You can dig me up by the roots, burn me on a pyre to appease your gods. Inhale the aroma, chant my name, and I will remain something apart from you. I have my own essence and it is not yours.

Me: I love you. You are not necessary to my survival. I don’t NEED to eat you. I’m not sure if you even provide any actual nourishment. And yet, I love you. I like knowing you are in my cabinet.

Cinnamon: You see! You want to possess me, to lock me up in a cabinet. You humans are all the same. You rape and pillage and claim everything is yours.

Me: I only want to exist beside you. I only want to know that I am part of the same creation that contains something as fantastic and mysterious as you are. You’re right. You are different than I am. You are a plant. I am an animal. You consume sunlight and soil. I consume plants and animals But we are together here. that

Cinnamon: I can imagine you sitting beside me on a hill in the tropical highlands. You would be still and meditative. Perhaps you would pluck a particularly resinous bit of fragrant bark from near my root and chew on me for a while. I’d be willing to give myself to you like this.

Me: And I am willing to give you a voice. I will declare your virtues to other apes like me.

Cinnamon: Don’t sell yourself short.

Me: Okay, I will contemplate you. I will bake with you. I will lavish you in powdered form across the surface of a batch of dough that I will roll around you and I will bake you in the oven, feed you to my sons, tell others what I did with you, how I came to know you and how we walked together through the world. I on two legs, you in some atomized form in a cloud around me, in a paste inside me, infusing my very blood and breath with warmth and perfume

Cinnamon: Okay you’re going too far. You know how you people get. You say too much, do too much.

Me: Okay, you’re right. Can I just be with you a while. Can I just smell your earthy fragrance, maybe share some with a friend?

Cinnamon: Of course.

Me: Silence

Cinnamon: I love you.

Me: I love you too.
 
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