I will take a picture of my tree and post it in the gallery if anyone is interested...

being quite the keen spice collector that i am, i have had UNTOLD amounts of grief with spice merchants claiming 'cinnamon' when they were selling me cassia...

the zeylanicum species is true cinnamon. thin, scroll-like quills. cassia is scroll-like also, though not as densely rolled, if that makes sense. the leaves of the cassia are also fragrant. they look like bayleaves, only with a thin vein that skirts the perimetre of the leaf...

hope that was of some help...

Now here's the interesting part. There is a third species, endemic to India which is used primarily for its fragrant leaves, Cinnamomum tamala. I buy the dried leaves for curries and these leaves look a lot like the tree I was shown in FNQ. I wonder if C.tamala plants have been sold in australia under the pseudonym C.zeylanicum? Any thoughts on this?

i'll have to give that dairy and mucousy gluey thing a go; sounds delightful...

i hope what i said up there makes sense. some of it still goes over my head, to tell you the truth...

can you post a picture of the leaf you have, or the one you're looking for? or both, even???

I'm not certain how many Cinnamomum species there are in India greater but I'm certain it's not thousands, probably more like a dozen at the very most. In my experience people from these countries are the least reliable source of information on details such as these. Confusion in regional naming, inexplicable variations in spelling and pronunciation and plain ignorance are rife, all that confounded by the ubiquitous air of self proclaimed authority on the subject make it very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

well, my work colleague was just exaggerating, i would assume. positively speaking, however, there are at least ten i have heard of...maybe they are all the known ones, so yeah...but i must say, in all my (lack of) experience, most of the ones i've seen (in books, that is...) looked pretty similar.

i totally agree with you on the ignorance of the locals of that region. generally, also, they have the arrogance to consider themselves the ONLY people who would know about plants like these. they get all high and mighty about it, too. i've had it happen to me once or twice! ummm...at the risk of perhaps going through something a little redundant, check the following site out. look around the inventory and click the relevant spice links.

let me ask you: does your plant grow well in adelaide? i thought that cinnamon would only grow in the tropics...

i would LOVE to compare spices some time. i have roughly 45 different spices, including grains of paradise, mahleb and white cardamom. i have all the other common ones, and with any luck, i'll have some zedoary to add to that list.

the spices that seem to evade me are: long pepper, cubeb, black limes and safflower. i can find the oil, but not the stigmas...

i think the WORST thing about having and accumulating so many spices is the goddamn vendors you have to deal with. man, they really annoy me. i remember once, in an indian grocers, i was looking at some frozen fenugreek (methi) leaves, and the condescending owner approached me, and TOTALLY without and prompting says "you've never seen that leaf before...", so i then proceeded to LIE through my teeth, just to make him squirm and make him feel like crap. i told him i lived in tamil nadu, in kanchipuram (my brother did all this, so i had plenty of stuff to lie about...), and that i used to run cooking classes for foreigners there, and that i knew all about their spices. being greek, i also added that the greeks used fenugreek a few millennia before the indians even knew what it was! man...i mean, what a jerk off. i bet if i was some indian mummy's boy that didn't know the difference between a knife or spoon he wouldn't've accosted me like that. jerk.

anyway, yeah...are there many markets for you to find these exotic flavourings in adelaide? i do most of my shopping in vietnamese grocers, mainly because they don't follow you around the store when you're browsing, also because they are sometimes a quarter of the price, and also because you don't get the frustrating pretension of some over-zealous shop clerk who blabs to you about how extensive his country's cuisine is. seriously, i've had it up to here with know-it-all spice shop owners. this one person tried to tell me that there was no such thing as tej pat! and that it was bay leaf!!!

anyway...i'll keep in touch with you, man...my name is mario, by the way...

ps. I also have some zedoary... or at least I think it is.