How cinnamon kills cravings with 'connection'
Finding home is a lot of what I talk about when I talk about cooking with spices. Home means connection — connection to people, to place, to identity.
The feeling of connection is a sweet strength, and this is the aroma of cinnamon.
I lived in Southern California for a few years in my early twenties with my (then) new husband, and cinnamon was everywhere — cinnamon-flavoured chewing gum, Starbucks pastries, coffee.
I ate it up.
Kashmiri cuisine employs liberal use of cinnamon. The quills were always a staple in Mum’s pantry. They were ground fresh for use in paneer or aloo-gobi sabzi.
Many years into the future, when my two sons were born, Dad would make cinnamon-flecked kaddu, so redolent of the spice, that its heat brought tears to my youngest son’s eyes, even as he continued to eat his fill.
These past and future feelings were what I chased in California with each stick of cinnamon gum that I popped into my mouth.
There is a lot of talk when it comes to a healthy diet and the pitfalls of ‘emotional eating’. Particularly as the temperature drops, days shorten, and the cold freezes all of our good intentions about eating well through the winter.
Emotional eating is what most of us do, most of the time. Food is memory and sensation as much as it is pleasure.
And that absolutely is right.
Yesterday morning I ate a nectarine so sweet that it filled me with summer. Last night I cooked a chicken curry that tasted almost exactly as the one Mum used to make.
The issue with emotional eating, however, isn’t that we do it. It’s how we do it. That is when I turn to cinnamon.
Cinnamon is an aroma of childhood. For my eldest son, Cailean, it smells of the banana smoothies I make him for breakfast. For me, cinnamon is paneer, the dish I loved most when dinner hit the family table. My time in California was the first time in my life when I had been far from family. I loved the freedom. But I missed the belonging. And so I ate cinnamon scones, thinking I was craving sweet when what I was really craving was the sweetness of being known.
Now when I crave sweet, I understand that processed sugars won’t satisfy the desire for 'connection' that cinnamon can. And so I cook very simply — sweet potato finely cubed in a pan with ghee, salt, amchoor, fragrant ground cinnamon, a little ground cassia to accentuate the warmth and the aroma of the cinnamon, the smallest amount of black pepper, cumin seeds and jaggery.
It is a dish where I let cinnamon do the talking. And when cinnamon talks, I listen.
As a bark, cinnamon speaks of upright strength. The whorl of its quill is the circular nature of love and of family — the way in which who we are always exists in relation to the people who encircle us.
Cinnamon’s sweetness reminds me that, while sometimes being defined by family is difficult, there are moments of beauty within that frame. So I zero-in on that beauty in order to cement my sense of meaning. With meaning cemented, the idea of emotional eating becomes a source of sustenance instead of a space of culinary self-sabotage or frustration.
Use cinnamon as a high-note of sweet remembrance. Surround it with jaggery, soft acidity, the warmth of chilli, an elongated zing of a soft pink salt, and then root it all down in an earthy spice that’ll keep you anchored in the joy — cumin seed with a backing of freshly ground dried coriander to bed that weight into something a little floral.
Turn to cinnamon as a beginning. Find in its scent the place where you belong, and then cook there.