Saturday, November 28, 2015

The Fruit Explorer Gets a Colonoscopy

On 24 Nov 2015 I had a colonoscopy. I knew that there were dietary restrictions in the days leading up to it, but since it was ten years since my last one, I couldn't remember what they were. When I received the instructions from my doctor, this time I read them with the eye of the Fruit Explorer. I found that there were dietary restriction for the five days before the procedure. (In another place the instructions said seven days. I was quick to adopt the less restrictive interpretation.)

On the last day before the procedure, no fruit is allowed, though one can drink white grape juice or apple juice.

On the four days before this last day, one is instructed to eat a low roughage/low residue diet. Exactly what  "low roughage/low residue" means is spelled out. As for fruit, the following is forbidden.
  • Fresh fruit.
  • Dried fruit.
  • Prunes and prune juice.
  • All berries and raisins.
This was a blow to the Fruit Explorer. This meant that there would be no fresh fruit for five days in total. I was plunged into gloom.

The following is allowed.
  • Ripe bananas.
  • Soft cantaloupe and honeydew melon.
  • Applesauce
  • Canned or cooked fruits without skins or seeds
  • Strained fruit juice.
This list somewhat relieved the gloom since I could have have bananas, cantaloupe, and canned fruit. I thought about trying fruit cocktail, the fruit of my youth, which I haven't had for perhaps forty years, but elected not to. (Circa 1972 Steve Agresta and I decided to take advantage of the economies of scale and bought an institutional-sized, 6 pound, 12 ounce can of fruit cocktail; see picture below. I now keep my plastic dinosaurs in this can, which is just barely big enough to hold them.)


I bought eight bananas of varying degrees of unripeness so they they would ripen as needed over the critical, four-day period. I also got a cantaloupe and a can of pineapple chunks. (Why are canned pineapple chunks allowed while chunks cut from a fresh pineapple are not?) It turned out that I overestimated the speed at which the bananas would ripen, so all eight of them were still unripe on the day of my colonoscopy, and they had to be carried over to the post-colonoscopy period. In "Sticker Shock VIII" you will see the aggregation of PLU stickers from my colonoscopy bananas. Disappointed by my bananas, I struggled through with the cantaloupe and can of pineapple chunks.

The verdict is that a colonoscopy presents quite a challenge to a devotee of fruit. No wonder this procedure has such a bad reputation.

Rick

Friday, November 20, 2015

The Fruit Explorer Takes a Road Trip to Penzeys Spices

On 17 Oct 2015 a catalog for Penzeys Spices (see below), which was addressed to Julee, a former tenant of my building, showed up in my mailbox. I found that the only Penzeys Spices store in Massachusetts is at 1293 Mass Ave in Arlington. They were promising a free bottle of Natural High Fat Cocoa, a $4.95 value, while supplies last. I decided to go on safari to Penzeys.

   

Trip

On 27 Oct 2015 I drove over to Penzeys. It wasn't that much of an adventure since it's only about two blocks from Trader Joe's; it took me eleven minutes to get there. The biggest adventure was finding a parking place. (After I had found a place, I noticed that Penzeys has a parking lot, so going there should entail no adventure at all.) Below is a picture of the store, with the parking lot in the background.



I went in, took out my camera, and started taking pictures. Almost immediately a saleslady approached me, and the following exchange occurred.

Saleslady: I'm sorry, but we don't allow pictures in here.
Fruit Explorer: Why not?
SL: Pictures of everything in here are available on the website.
FE: I just wanted to take some pictures of the store to send to some of my friends.
SL: Pictures of everything in here are available on the website.
FE: Since this is the only store in Massachusetts, my friends want to know what it's like before they drive all the way here.
SL: Pictures of everything in here are available on the website.
FE: They want to know what this particular store is like. After all, it might be that not everything on the website is in this store.
SL: You're not taking pictures of the entire store. You're taking pictures of specific items.
FE: What possible harm could it do you if I took pictures?
SL: Pictures of everything in here are available on the website.

Unable to argue with her logic, I put away my camera. This thirty second exchange converted me from an eager customer into a hostile presence. 

As I continued to browse, I found that many of their "spices" were actually special purpose mixtures. For example, Galena Street is a chicken and rib rub composed of salt, sugar, black pepper, and five more spices. Tuscan Sunset (use unspecified) contains basil, oregrano, and six other spices. Arizona Dreaming (use unspecified) contains ground ancho (a type of chile pepper), onion, and nine more spices.

Walking through this store was like a trip down Fruit Explorer memory lane as I encountered many items I have written about. Each spice is typically laid out on a spacious shelf with several variants that are very well signed. For pictures and full details, you will have to go to the aforementioned site, Penzeys.com.

I first hit the cinnamon (5 Nov 2015) section and was pleased to see that they had all four kinds of cinnamon (Ceylonese, Chinese, Indonesian, Viet Namese) clearly labeled. I checked the thickness of the Ceylonese cinnamon sticks and verified that indeed they were Ceylonese. The prices varied fro $4.40 to $7.95 for a half cup bottle, and the prices reflected the quality of each type. I picked up a bottle of Ceylon cinnamon. 

I will quickly go over some of the other offerings. They had several varieties of cocoa (16 May 2015), black and white peppercorns (16 Oct 2015) plus various mixtures of different types of peppercorns, whole yellow and brown mustard seeds (12 June 2015) but not black, ginger (13 Nov 2015) in various forms but no hands of ginger, whole and ground cloves (22 Oct 2015), and whole vanilla beans (22 May 2015). They had blade mace, i.e., the mace as removed from the nutmeg nut but not ground, and both whole and ground nutmeg (30 Oct 2015). Since I had not seen whole nutmeg anywhere else, I asked permission to take a picture, and this request was granted; see this picture in the e-mail of 30 Oct 2015. It's a good thing I took this picture because, when I later looked on the website, there was no picture (see below). In person, a whole nutmeg is surprisingly small, about 2/3 of an inch long. It looks like a cross between a small pecan and a small walnut. The sign said that it took 80 of them to make a pound. They had lots of unexpected things, e.g., juniper berries.


When I went to check out and pay for my cinnamon, I presented the coupon for my free bottle of cocoa powder and was told, "I'm sorry, but you'll have to come back. We ran out of that this morning. " Yeah, sure. I had just seen the cocoa powder shelf, and there was no space and no sign for the variety they were giving away free.

Gift Idea

This whole store is one big gift idea for anyone who eats. You can wander the isles and pick up a vial of vanilla beans or a bag of whole nutmegs. If you want a more formal gift, you can select one of the pre-packaged gift boxes. Three are pictured below. (These are the only pictures I got before the saleslady cut me off.)
  • Hot Chocolate Gift Set for $37.59.
  • Two Hearts Gift Crate for $204.99.
  • Taco Seasonings Gift Box for $45.55. 

   

   



The Verdict

So what do I think of this store? It's a special purpose store that sells a narrow range of items, but within this narrow range it has exceptionally good coverage. The prices are a little high, but given the difficulty of finding some of these items, the variety of forms in which each spice is offered, and the unusual care taken in labeling, I conclude that this is the place to go for spices.

Rick

P.S. Below is the latest Fruit Explorer art work, "Sticker Shock VII," which was assembled from 2 Oct to 13 Nov 2015. The new feature introduced in this art work is that it is symmetrical around the center line.

Friday, November 13, 2015

The Fruit Explorer Ponders Spices: Ginger, Part 1 of 2

This is the last of a series of six e-mails on the spices that drove the Age of Discovery. Before reading this e-mail, I recommend that you read the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015, which provides useful background.

The Plant

The ginger plant, Zingiber officinale, is in the ginger family. Zingiberaceae. Turmeric and Cardamon are other spices in this family. Ginger has been cultivated so long that it is no longer found in the wild state [Turner, p. xxiii].

The ginger plant is three or four feet tall with yellow flowers. Here are some pictures.
  • Ginger farm
  • Drawing of the entire plant. 
  • The linear leaves (two pictures).
  • Flower bud. 
  • Close-up of a flower.
  • A detail from the drawing that shows a close-up of the flower.

                



We will not pause over the leaves, flower, or fruit since this plant's importance lies in a botanical structure that has not yet been discussed in these e-mails, namely the rhizome. We are used to thinking of plants as having shoots above ground and roots below ground. There is no reason, however, why a plant should not have a shoot below ground, and such an underground shoot is a rhizome (also called a rootstock or a creeping rootstalk); see the pictures below. Why we focus on the rhizome rather than the other plant parts is that it is the rhizome that yields the spice ginger. For an extended discussion of rhizomes, see the appendix.

 


The ginger plant is a perennial, but it is usually grown as an annual; harvest is at the latest 10-12 months after planting [Valenzuela, pp. 2, 6]. The quality of the rhizome declines if harvesting is delayed [Valenzuela, p. 3]. The plant is propagated from portions of the rhizome; a farmer will usually save 5-10 percent of the rhizome to use as seed for the next crop [Valenzuela, pp. 2, 4, 7]. The flowers are usually sterile and seldom set seed [Valenzuela, pp. 2, 4]; this is a consequence of this plant having been long domesticated

About 25 percent shade is optimum for the ginger plant, and it is often planted among betelnut palms, coconut palms, and fruit trees [Valenzuela, p. 3].

Worldwide more than 25 cultivars of ginger are grown, and they differ in flavor, aroma, and pungency [Valenzuela, p. 4].

There is a plant called wild ginger with an exotic-looking, three-petaled, brownish purple flower that grows at the base of the plant (see picture below). I have seen this flower in Western Massachusetts where the underlying bedrock is limestone. This plant is in the Aristolochiaceae, the birthwort family, and is not closely related to the plant that produces the spice ginger. The root of wild ginger has a ginger-like odor, and reputable authorities claim that its root can be used as a ginger substitute [Niering, p. 249, Fernald and Kinsey, p. 167]. Before you experiment with it, however, be aware that wild ginger contains aristolochic acid; the FDA has advised "...consumers to immediately discontinue use of any botanical products containing aristolochic acid. The FDA explains the rationale for this advice: 

Consumption of products containing aristolochic acid has been associated with permanent kidney damage, sometimes resulting in kidney failure that has required kidney dialysis or kidney transplantation. In addition, some patients have developed certain types of cancers, most often occurring in the urinary tract.

If you are wondering whether some of the traditional Chinese medicine that you are taking contains aristolochic acid, you can consult this FDA report. This is another lesson that natural does not necessarily mean healthy.



History

Ginger is indigenous to South China, but its cultivation has now spread around the world [Valenzuela, p. 3]. India was the main source of ginger for Europeans in ancient, medieval, and early modern times, and India is currently the largest producer of ginger.

Ginger reached Europe in the first century A.D. via the spice trade route that went through India [Valenzuela, p. 3]. According to one site:

Ginger was one of the earliest spices known in Western Europe, used since the ninth century. It became so popular in Europe that it was included in every table setting, like salt and pepper. A common article of medieval and Renaissance trade, it was one of the spices used against the plague. In English pubs and taverns in the nineteenth century, barkeepers put out small containers of ground ginger, for people to sprinkle into their beer — the origin of ginger ale.

In Galenic medicine, which ruled for about a millenium and a half, including all the Medieval period, foods were graded along the four fundamental dimensions of hot, cold, dry, and wet [Turner, p. 164]. According to this theory, it was the hot  and wet that promoted sexual performance [Turner, p. 191], and ginger (along with galangal) was the only spice that was hot and wet [Turner, p. 166n]. As Turner notes [p. 192] of Medieval Europe, "Because of ginger's rare hot-wet classification, it was the most sought after of all the spices."

In the 11th century in the Benedictine monastery at Hirsau in Wurttemberg, the strict rule was perpetual silence (with an exception made for confessions). According to Blessed William, abbot of the monastery,when one of the monks wanted ginger, he could ask for it in sign language: 

For the sign of ginger, ... with your right hand clenched in a fist, raised up high, moving it round in a circle around your jaw; keep moving it around your jaw; then stick out your tongue, and lick your index finger. [quoted in Turner, p. 277]

In the 14th century the Chinese would grow ginger in wooden boxes aboard ship during long ocean voyages to combat scurvy [Keay, p. 19, Turner, p. xxiii]. Europeans did not have a recognized way to prevent scurvy until Captain Cook's voyages in the 18th century (though there is, as always, controversy).

The Spice

Valenzuela [p. 7] describes the criteria that determine when ginger should be harvested:

...ginger is harvested at various stages, depending on the product that is desired. The early harvest from 5-6 months after planting, yields tender rhizomes with less fiber for use as candied products. The second harvest about two months later when plants are about 85% of their maximum size, yields rhizomes with the highest content of essential oils and oleoresins, used for the preparation of dehydrated products. The fully mature rhizomes obtained at the last harvest are used for drying and for grinding to produce powdered ginger.

"Young ginger" is the term applied to the ginger harvested after 5-6 months. Since the rhizome accumulates mass faster toward the end of its life, there is a sacrifice in harvesting early. Typical yields per plant are 1-3 kg for young ginger and 2-7 kg when fully mature [Valenzuela, p. 9].

Once harvested, the ginger must be processed to prevent prevent sprouting and otherwise prepare it for sale, as described by Valenzuela [p. 7]:

After harvest, rhizomes are cleaned of soil and debris using water sprayed at high pressure. The rhizomes may also be cleaned with a soft brush or coconut fiber, and are then air-dried on screen racks. To allow all the exposed tissues to heal and become firm, the rhizomes are normally allowed to air cure under well ventilated conditions for a period of 3-5 days. Once cured, the rhizomes are graded and packed for shipping.

You will often see these raw looking, stag-horn shaped rhizomes for sale in grocery stores, especially in Chinatown; see the picture below. The rhizome is often called a hand, and the protrusions are called fingers. You can grind off a little bit yourself as you need it, or you can buy it pre-ground. The rate at which ginger loses its potency increases when it is cut, so it pays to purchase a hand and to practice just-in-time grinding. Shelf-life for a rhizome is about six months if you store it under ideal conditions of temperatures 12-13 degrees C and 85 percent relative humidity. Storing at normal refrigerator temperature, which is maybe 3-4 degrees C, will result in tissue softening, skin discoloration, and decay [Valenzuela, p. 8]. Since you probably don't have a device that will hold the temperature at 12-13 degrees C, storing a rhizome will present a problem. 



As for the use of this spice, Wikipedia has a good summary.

Ginger produces a hot, fragrant kitchen spice. Young ginger rhizomes are juicy and fleshy with a very mild taste. They are often pickled in vinegar or sherry as a snack or cooked as an ingredient in many dishes. They can be steeped in boiling water to make ginger tea, to which honey is often added; sliced orange or lemon fruit may be added. Ginger can be made into candy, or ginger wine, which has been made commercially since 1740.

Mature ginger rhizomes are fibrous and nearly dry. The juice from ginger roots is often used as a spice in Indian recipes and is a common ingredient of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and many South Asian cuisines for flavoring dishes such as seafood, meat, and vegetarian dishes.

Fresh ginger can be substituted for ground ginger at a ratio of six to one, although the flavors of fresh and dried ginger are somewhat different. Powdered dry ginger root is typically used as a flavoring for recipes such as gingerbread, cookies, crackers and cakes, ginger ale, and ginger beer.

Candied ginger, or crystallized ginger, is the root cooked in sugar until soft, and is a type of confectionery.

Fresh ginger may be peeled before eating. For longer-term storage, the ginger can be placed in a plastic bag and refrigerated or frozen. [Links and a footnote omitted.]

(Counterpoint: According to this site, dried ginger and fresh ginger taste different and cannot be substituted in recipes. In regions where fresh ginger is available, dried ginger is not widely used.)

In the spice-conscious Middle Ages, half a dozen different varieties and grades of ginger were recognized [Krondl, pp. 70-71]. See this site for the distinctions currently drawn among fresh ginger, powdered ginger, ginger flakes, preserved (or stem) ginger, crystallized ginger, pickled ginger, ginger juice, and ginger beer.

Ginger is used in a wide variety of specialized products. Below are pictures of two, ginger glazed macadamia nuts and ginger syrup.

   

Numerous different uses of ginger are made in the various cuisines of the world. See Wikipedia if you are interested. In brief, in the East, ginger is a staple and is usually  fresh, while ginger receives relatively minor use in the U.S. and is usually dried [Bown, p. 18]. It's fair to say that in the West ginger has largely fallen out of cookbooks. In short, the West is ripe to rediscover ginger.

Miscellany

Since ginger is on the FDA's "generally recognized as safe" list, for the most part you don't need to be careful about eating ginger unless you take the drug Warfarin, with which ginger interacts. For more on the health effects of ginger, see this NIH site.

Testing has not been able to confirm or refute the claim that ginger can slow the growth of tumors.

"For over 5000 years ginger was revered as the 'universal medicine' by the ancient Orientals of China and India and highly sought after by spice traders," according to this site.

Since ginger is the least fussy of the spices and easy to grow, ginger is a good plant for a home garden as long as you do not get a frost heavy enough to freeze the rhizome [Turner, p. xxiii, Valenzuela, p. 8]. Go to this site if you want tips on how to grow ginger at home. If you want to turn this into a retirement activity, you can expect to earn $7500 per acre, at least if you live in Hawaii [Valenzuela, p. 12]; undertake this only if you are a plunger, however, since this crop bears a high degree of risk due to price volatility and the chance of crop loss due to disease [Valenzuela, p. 12]. 

If you like your tea spicy, make ginger tea by soaking slices of fresh ginger in black tea for a few minutes.

Ginger ale is made from plant extract, sugar, and carbonated water.

Ginger has a place in the history of animal abuse, according to this site.

In animal husbandry it was used in order to 'gee up' a lazy horse, it is the time honoured practice of Figging - To treat a horse in such a way as to make the animal appear lively, as by putting a piece of ginger into the anus. Because Ginger is an irritant, the animal will act more lively and carry it's tail high, a favourable trait with Arabs and other highly spirited breeds of show horse. This treatment is outlawed by Equestrian organisations and today is considered as animal abuse.

The party and travel tips appear after the appendix; they only make sense if you read the appendix. Everyone should read the appendix since it contains material of interest. This material is placed in an appendix so that it doesn't interrupt the discussion of ginger.

Last Word on Spices

This ends the series of six e-mails on the classic spices of the Age of Discovery. Here is a final reminder of the six spices, with their main geographic source in the 16th century and the part of the plant that yields the spice in parentheses. 
  • Pepper (India, unripe fruit)
  • Nutmeg and mace (Banda Islands, kernel and covering of the seed, respectively)
  • Cloves (Molucca Islands, unopened flower bud)
  • Cinnamon (Ceylon, inner bark)
  • Ginger (India, rhizome, i.e., an underground shoot used as a storage organ)
In the e-mail of 1 Feb 2015 you learned how to use grafting to grow potatoes and tomatoes on the same plant. You can now sympathize with the Medieval dream of a plant with ginger for the root, cinnamon for the bark, clove for the flower, pepper for the fruit, and nutmeg and mace for the seed. [Turner, p. 99]. If you are looking for a horticultural challenge, then this is the plant for you. In comparison, settling for being a melon breeder (15 Aug 2015) seems tame.

Rick

(Continued in Part 2)

The Fruit Explorer Ponders Spices: Ginger, Part 2 of 2

(Continued from Part 1)

Appendix: Rhizomes (with Emphasis on Vegetative Reproduction)

It was mentioned above that the spice ginger is derived from the rhizome of the ginger plant. We have not previously encountered rhizomes in this series of e-mails, so this appendix covers them. Since discussion of vegetative reproduction in these e-mails has mainly been limited to grafting (1 Feb and 27 Mar 2015), the role of rhizomes in vegetative reproduction will be stressed here. (Vegetative reproduction is to be contrasted with sexual reproduction. In sexual reproduction in plants, the genes from the parents are mixed to form a new set of genes, and these genes are incorporated into a seed, which then sprouts to reproduce. In vegetative reproduction, the plant reproduces just by growing; since there is no mixing of genes, the product is a clone, unless a mutation happens to occur.)

A rhizome, though it is underground, is not a root since it does not perform the root functions of taking in water and nutrients. In fact, a rhizome is a shoot just like the parts of the plant that we see growing above ground. Most shoots exhibit what is called a geotropism, which means that they grow opposite to the direction of the force of gravity, i.e., they grow up. Rhizomes, in contrast, exhibit what is called a diageotropism, which means that they grow perpendicular to the force of gravity, i.e., they grow horizontally.

Rhizomes serve two main functions. First, they are storage organs that hold protein and starch that can be used whenever the plant needs them. Second, the rhizome can send up new vertical shoots, which allow the plant to reproduce, and it can also send out new roots, which feed the plant. If a rhizome is divided into two pieces, each piece can start a new plantExamples of plants in addition to ginger that spread by rhizomes are bamboo, Venus flytrap, poplars, irises, hops, and asparagus.

For a concrete example of reproduction by rhizomes, consider the quaking aspen. The rhizome spreads under the earth, and every once in a while sends up a new trunk. This process of vegetative reproduction by rhizome is described by an article in Bioscience, quoted in Wikipedia

...quaking aspen regularly reproduces via a process called suckering. An individual stem can send out lateral roots [sic] that, under the right conditions, send up other erect stems; from all above-ground appearances the new stems look just like individual trees. The process is repeated until a whole stand, of what appear to be individual trees, forms. This collection of multiple stems, called ramets, all form one, single, genetic individual, usually termed a clone [genet].

Therefore, you might be looking at a grove of quaking aspens and thinking that you are looking at a number of separate trees. In fact, this is one organism that is comprised of the many trunks, plus the shared rhizome. Here is some useful terminology: The genet is the entire organism, and a ramet is each individual trunk. This terminology applies not just to quaking aspens but to any plant that spreads with a rhizome. (Some think that the quaking aspen got its name since the tree quakes in fear because the cross on which Jesus was crucified was made of aspen.)

The most famous rhizome on earth belongs to a quaking aspen genet called the Trembling Giant (or Pando). It is located in Fishlake National Forest in the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, which is marked by a red dagger in the map below. The Trembling Giant covers 106 acres, has about 47,000 ramets, i.e., trunks, and weighs about 13 million pounds. Estimates of its age range from 80,000 to a million years old. (An individual trunk is rarely more than 200 years old; the Trembling Giant is so old because it keeps growing new trunks as old ones die.) The Trembling Giant was discovered in 1968, and the claim that it was a single organism was initially based on morphology, e.g., the angle between the trunk and branches, and the fall colors, both of which are genetically determined; since then, DNA testing has confirmed this claim. Quaking aspens are dioecious, i.e., have male and female flowers on different trees; the Trembling Giant is male.


The advantage of having a large and dispersed rhizome is explained by Michael C. Grant

Aspen stands are just as complex below ground as above. Their intricate network of roots can ferry nutrients from one part of the clone to another. Roots near an abundant water supply, for example, may provide water to other roots and shoots in a much drier area. These parts of the clone can return the favor if their roots have access to crucial nutrients missing from the wet area. By distributing its water and nutrients over its entire expanse, a quaking aspen clone can survive in a patchy environment where other trees might die off.
Since the quaking aspen is a pioneer tree that typically invades treeless land and is then replaced by other trees in the floral succession, you will wonder how the Trembling Giant could last so long. Wikipedia explains:

Pando is thought to have grown for much of its lifetime under ideal circumstances: frequent forest fires have prevented its main competitor, conifers, from colonizing the area, and a climate shift from wet and humid to semi-arid has obstructed seedling establishment and the accompanying rivalry from younger aspens. During intense fires, the organism survived underground, with its root system sending up new stems in the aftermath of each wildfire. [Link omitted]

Ramets send a hormonal signal to the rhizome that suppresses the formation of new ramets; when there is a fire, however, and numerous ramets are destroyed, the resulting lack of this hormone means that the rhizome responds by sending up numerous new ramets to populate the ravaged area.

If there were were no humans, the Trembling Giant would eventually die not because of some internal clock but because of climate change or because it succumbed to a disease. With the coming of humans, however, new dangers arise. In the area where the Trembling Giant lives, not only have homes been built but also campgrounds with roads, picnic tables, and toilets. Also, the presence of people has led the Forest Service to suppress wildfires, which are the breath of life to the Trembling Giant. Without fire, conifers will gradually encroach on its edges and shade it out, then, since the the quaking aspen cannot tolerate shade, the Trembling Giant will die. Not even the oldest and largest organism on earth can withstand the pestiferous humans. No wonder the Giant trembles.

A tiny fragment of the Trembling Giant in the fall is pictured below.



In 2006, the United States Postal Service issued a sheet of stamps, "Wonders of America: Land of Superlatives," One stamp labeled "Largest Plant:Quaking Aspen" illustrates the Trembling Giant. 

   


That's all I have to say about rhizomes. Perhaps some future e-mail will cover other plant organs used for reproduction or storage such as stolons, corms, and tubers.

Party Tip

The sheet of stamps mentioned above that features the Trembling Giant, "Wonders of America: Land of Superlatives" (see picture below), also depicts another 39 superlatives. Your party tip is to start a discussion in which your guests recount their experiences of the superlatives they have encountered. Purchase this sheet at this site and give it to the guest who has experienced the most superlatives. You will find that these stamps will release a flood of nostalgia that will send your guests home with the sense of a life well lived. Here are some of my favorites. 
  • "Oldest Trees: Bristlecone Pines," which Mike and I inspected at Cedar Breaks National Monument in June of 1984 not far from Cedar City, Utah, which, as you can see in the map above, is down the interstate to the south of Fishlake National Forest. These trees, thousands of years old, were stunted and contorted, looking more dead than alive. They lived at altitude on the edge of a cliff with a 2000 foot drop and were subject to a never-ceasing, strong, cold wind. Below is a picture of Cedar Breaks and another of some of the healthier bristlecone pines at Cedar Breaks; a third picture shows more typical, decrepit bristlecone pines (location unknown). I lost the bristlecone pine cone that I smuggled home as a souvenir.
  • "Windiest Place: Mount Washington," which Mike and I climbed in June of 1982 and again in June of 1983. At the top of Mount Washington, we did not experience the 231 mph wind reported in 12 April 1934, which is the highest wind ever observed not associated with a tornado or hurricane.
  • "Tallest Cactus: Saguaro," which my sister and I inspected in Nov 1977 at Giant Saguaro National Monument outside of Tuscon, AZ. Below is a picture of me paying homage to the giant saguaro. Giant saguaros in art works are almost always depicted in the ideal configuration with two arms on opposite sides of the plant at unequal heights; you can survey hundreds of actual giant saguaros and not find a single one that adheres to this ideal.

 
 
 
 


            

Travel Tip

You will want to visit the Trembling Giant and immerse yourself in the awe that comes from being in the presence of what can lay claim to being both the largest and the oldest living organism on earth. As the map above shows, you can fly to Salt Lake City and then take I-15 south to Fishlake National Forest. You can drop by Fish Lake, the largest Mountain lake in Utah, which features trophy fishing, or you can watch for mountain goats. If, however, you want to skip these attractions, use your GPS to go straight to the coordinates of the Trembling Giant, N38.525, W111.75. Be aware that the Trembling Giant is at an altitude of 8848 feet, so be prepared to deal with altitude sickness. Google Maps shows numerous photos of the area. Most of these photos show what appear to be quaking aspens; perhaps they are ramets of the Trembling Giant. Here are two of these pictures.
  • Fish Lake in fall colors.
  • Doctor Creek Campground. You will need accommodations, and this campground might please you. My conjecture is that all those white trunks with dark splotches are quaking aspens. This might be one of the campgrounds mentioned above that is built on top of the Trembling Giant.
 


You might want to hack off a piece of the Trembling Giant's rhizome, bring it back East, and plant it. Perhaps you could establish an eastern outpost of the Trembling Giant. This would make it easier for those of us in the East to worship this majestic organism. Perhaps the two branches of the Trembling Giant will eventually meet, and you can hold the analog of the golden spike ceremony that marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad. In fact, for this ceremony you might want to employ the original golden spike (pictured below), which is now displayed at the Cantor Arts Museum at Stanford University. To bring out the full resonance of this event, you will want to mimic the original celebration held on 10 May 1869, which is pictured below in the famous photograph by A.J. Russell. (You might have seen later copies of this picture in which the alcoholic beverages at the focal point were airbrushed out.)

 

If you fall in love with Fishlake National Forest and decide you want to work there, here is how you apply for a job. 

I have gone through the Fish Lake National Forest website and, strange to say, there is no mention of the Trembling Giant. I guess they don't want to encourage thrillseekers.

While in the area, you might want to cruise down the interstate, drop by the Cedar Breaks National Monument, and view the bristlecone pines. 

References

Bown, Stephen R., Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900, Thomas Dunne Books, 2009. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.

Fernald, Merritt Lyndon and Alfred Charles Kinsey, Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America, Gray Herbarium of Harvard University, Special Publication, Idlewild Press, 1943. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 16 May 2015. 

Grant, Michael C., "The Trembling Giant," Discover, October 1993, no pagination in the on-line version. This article is written by a scientist who has studied the Trembling Giant and who bestowed its alternate name, Pando ("I spread" in Latin). This article is available at http://discovermagazine.com/1993/oct/thetremblinggian285. This article, supplemented by Wikipedia, gives a good, quick, popular introduction to the Trembling Giant. Since there are no page numbers in the Internet version, which is all I have access to, above I have referred to this article with a link. I first heard about the Trembling Giant in 1982, but I did not again encounter it until I came to write this e-mail. Such are the pleasures of fruit exploring.

Keay, John, The Spice Route A History, University of California Press, 2006. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.

Krondl, Michael, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice, Ballantine Books, 2007. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015. 

Niering, William A., The Audubon Society Guide to North American Wildflowers: Eastern Region, Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 12 Jun 2015. 

Turner, Jack, Spice: The History of a Temptation, Vintage Books, paperback, 2005 (first published in hardback in 2004).  For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.

Valenzuela, Hector, Farm and Forestry Production and Marketing Profile for Ginger (Zingiber officinale), in C.R. Elevitch, Speciality Crops for Pacific Island Agroforestry, Permanent Agricultural Resources, Holualoa, Hawaii, http://agroforestry.net/scps, 2011. I only had access to the on-line version at http://agroforestry.net/images/pdfs/Ginger_specialty_crop.pdf.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

The Fruit Explorer Ponders Spices: Cinnamon

This is the fifth in a series of six e-mails on spices. Before reading this e-mail, I recommend that you read the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015, which provides useful background.

The Plant

Cinnamon comes from several species in the genus Cinnamonium in the family Lauraceae, the laurel family. Members of this family in New England include the sassafras, which is often seen in the woods around Boston. Other members of this family provide avocados and bay leaves. Perversely, the common laurels (sheep, mountain, great) are not in the laurel family but are in the heath family, along with blueberries. Cinnamonium verum (or Cinnamonium zeylanicumis often called true cinnamon or Ceylon cinnamon, and "cassia" is sometimes used to refer to the other species of cinnamon trees. In this e-mail, "cinnamon" will unless otherwise stated be used to refer to all generically. I use "Ceylon" and"Sri Lanka" interchangeably.

In the wild the true cinnamon tree can grow to a height of 50 feet, but under cultivation it is usually kept to about 10 feet or less. The two pictures below shows a cinnamon plantation in Sri Lanka. The trees are all short, and the trunks have small diameters. This will be explained shortly.

 

Here are pictures of Sri Lankan cinnamon.
  • Close up of the leaves.
  • The foliage and flowers.
  • A close-up of the flowers.
  • The fruit.
  • Leaf, fruit, and seed. 
  • For comparison, the last picture shows a flower of the Indonesian cinnamon.

 
            

The cinnamon plant is cultivated by what is called coppicing. Generally, coppicing means that the tree is cut off at ground level. The response of the tree is to send up a number of stump sprouts (sometimes called shoots or suckers) from the side of the stump. After some number of years, these sprouts are again cut off at ground level, and the cycle then repeats, where the length of the cycle depends on the species and on the intended use of the wood. (See the general, explanatory picture below; the cycle length does not apply to cinnamon, but I have been unable to discover the cycle length for cinnamon, though I have seen a suggestion that it is 2-3 years; this makes sense since cinnamon, like most tropical trees, is fast growing.) Coppicing might be followed for a number of reasons, e.g., to provide poles of a desired size (coppiced shoots are usually straight without the bends of uncoppiced wood), to provide flexible shoots for wattle fencing and wicker-work, and to provide the raw material for charcoal. A common reason for coppicing in England was that until the 20th century it was difficult to transport large logs, which could only be used locally. Presumably, cinnamon is coppiced because this maximizes the production of the inner bark from which the spice comes. A traditional coppiced woodlot is divided into sections, where each section is at a different stage of growth. Not only does this provide a crop every year, but this means that different sections are in different stages of growth, and this promotes biodiversity.

  

The cinnamon plant can be propagated by seeds or cuttings.

History

Cinnamon was known in Egypt as early as 2000 B.C. It was valued so highly that it was considered a suitable gift for kings or even gods. Among other uses, the Egyptians used it for embalming

In ancient Greece and Rome the origin of cinnamon was unknown; it arrived  "... by unknown means from the vast blank spaces on the map, spaces populated by dragons, gods, and monsters" [Turner, p. 231]. Following in the grand tradition of spice traders, the traders played dumb to protect their monopoly and said that they didn't know where it came from. Herodotus [3.111] stepped into this knowledge void and asserted that cinnamon came from Arabia and that the Arabians gathered it in a picturesque way.

...it is said that huge birds carry the stalks, which we have learned from the Phoenicians to call cinnamon, to nests of clay that they have built hanging from steep mountains completely inaccessible to men. But the Arabians have surmounted this problem rather cleverly. They cut up the limbs of dead cattle, donkeys, and other beasts of burden into pieces as large as they can carry, scatter them in the area under the nests, and then move out of the way. The birds swoop down for the limbs of the beasts and take them back to their nests, but the nests cannot bear the weight and so crash to the ground, where the men then collect the cinnamon that comes down along with them.

Herodotus made the classic mistake of thinking that the point from which a spice was procured, in this case Arabia, was the true origin of the spice. Don't get the idea that the ancients were entirely uncritical. Pliny  the Elder (circa 23-79 A.D.) dismissed Herodotus's story by saying, "These tales have been invented by the natives in order to raise the price of their commodities" [quoted in Keay, p. 42].

In ancient Rome cinnamon "...was far and away the most esteemed and important of the Eastern spices" [Turner, p. 230]. Strange to say, however, aside from a single reference to spiced wine, there is no evidence that the Romans ate cinnamon [Turner, p. 148]. Rather, it was used in funeral rites and other religious devotions [Turner, p. 148-49, 228-31]. In addition to its aroma, it was convenient since it could be powdered and added to oils to produce a paste, or the sticks could be fed to the flames [Turner, p. 230].

As late as 1250, a well-informed Crusader in Egypt believed that cinnamon (as well as ginger) was dredged up in nets from the source of the Nile [Turner, pp. 43-44]. By the end of the 13th century, however, it came to be known that Ceylon was the homeland of cinnamon. Venice obtained cinnamon in Alexandria and came to have a monopoly on the distribution of cinnamon in Europe. Cinnamon became a status symbol in Europe. 

Both because of the high prices for cinnamon and also because the trade routes were disrupted by various factor, e.g., the rise of the Ottoman Empire, European desire for a direct route to the source of cinnamon grew.

After Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, the Portuguese kept exploring, and they came to Ceylon in 1505 when an adverse wind blew a Portuguese fleet into Colombo. The Portuguese in 1518 built a fort on Ceylon and tried ineffectually to establish a monopoly on Ceylon cinnamon. 

The Dutch started contesting with the Portuguese for the island in the early 1600s, established a trading post in 1638, and succeeded in totally expelling the Portuguese in 1658 [Russell-Wood, p. 193]. The Dutch, as usual, were much more thorough about enforcing a monopoly than the Portuguese, and in the 17th century cinnamon became the most profitable spice for the Dutch East India Company. In parallel with what we have seen with cloves (22 Oct 2015) and nutmeg (30 Oct 2015), Dutch rule exhibited its standard pattern of local revolts followed by draconian suppression [Turner, p. 297]. The Dutch were sometimes forced to drastic measures to protect their monopoly; to get rid of excess supply, in June of 1760 the Dutch burned 16 million French livres worth of cinnamon; the fragrant plume wafted over Holland [Turner, p. 297]. 

When the English took Ceylon over from the Dutch in 1795, cinnamon plants were transplanted throughout the British Empire [Turner, p. 297]. The demand for cinnamon, however, was falling as tastes shifted toward coffee, tea, chocolate, and sugar. Cinnamon was well on the way to losing its mystique and becoming  just another commodity in world trade. 

Cinnamon was important in European cooking in the 16th to 18th centuries; its use is now greatly diminished, with its main use being in desserts. It remains popular in South Asia, its native land. 

The Spice

True cinnamon is produced in the following steps. (All pictures are of Ceylon cinnamon.)
  • Harvest the stems. The two pictures below show a farmer in Sri Lanka harvesting coppiced cinnamon trees with a hatchet. 
 

  • Scrape off and discard the outer bark. The picture shows an assembly line of bark scrapers in hats at work. This step and the next must be undertaken immediately after harvest and completed while the inner bark is still wet.

  • Beat the now exposed inner bark with a hammer to loosen it, then pry it off in cylindrical  strips perhaps a yard long. These strips are stuffed with trimmings to maintain a roughly circular cross-section. This inner bark is about half a millimeter thick.
 

  • Dry the bark, which takes from four to six days under favorable conditions. The inner bark rolls up into what is called a "quill."

  • Once dry, cut the quill into cinnamon sticks two to four inches long.
 
 

  • If desired, grind the cinnamon stick into a powder.
The first four steps of this process are very nicely illustrated in the first three minutes of this video or in this video; these videos supplied the pictures of the process used here.

If stored in an airtight glass container, a cinnamon stick will maintain its potency for maybe a year. Powdered cinnamon will not last as long.

Four species provide bark that is sold as cinnamon. The term "cassia" refers to the last three species.
  • Sri Lankan or Ceylon or true cinnamon (Cinnamonium verum): Considered by connoisseurs in the West and South Asia to be the most delicately flavored form of cinnamon with an aroma that hints of incense [Krondl, p. 163]. The inner bark is about half a millimeter thick. It can easily be reduced to a powder, unlike the other three varieties. Here is a video that tells all about true cinnamon as produced today in Sri Lanka.
  • Chinese cinnamon (Cinnamonium cassia): Made from all layers of the bark,not just the inner. The walls are between three and ten millimeters thick. It is used in cinnamon rolls and other baked goods since its strong flavor stands up well to baking. This is the preferred form of cinnamon in Southeast and Central.Asia. This spice is always sold in pieces since the bark is not supple enough to roll into a quill.
  • Indonesian cinnamon (Cinnamonium burmanii): Indonesian cinnamon tastes much like true cinnamon, but the walls of its quills are from one to three millimeters thick. It can be rolled into a quill.
  • Vietnamese cinnamon (Cinnamonium loureiroi): Always sold in pieces since the bark is not supple enough to roll into a quill. This looks much like Chinese cinnamon but with the walls being somewhat thinner. Vietnamese cinnamon is virtually unavailable, in part because it has a poor reputation.
How do you know what type of cinnamon you are buying if, as is usually the case, the label does not say? If you are an expert and can examine the cinnamon sticks, it is easy to distinguish the four types. For example, in the picture below, true cinnamon is on the left and Indonesian on the right; the true cinnamon has lighter-colored, thinner bark. If you are not an expert, you can perhaps pick out cassia since it has a noticeable burn in its aftertaste [Krondl, p. 163]. About a quarter of world production is true cinnamon, with the bulk of the rest being Indonesian cinnamon. Most of the "cinnamon" sold in the U.S. is in fact cassia [Krondl, p. 163].



MIscellany

As Wikipedia states, "Cinnamon has a long history of use in traditional medicine." The NIH has investigated these uses of cinnamon and concluded, "High-quality clinical evidence (i.e., studies in people) to support the use of cinnamon for any medical condition is generally lacking."

The essential oil of cinnamon can make an environmentally friendly pesticide; it has been shown to kill mosquito larvae.

"To the Venerable Bede [ca. 673-735] and dozens who copied him, pale, ashen-brown cinnamon was taken as a symbol of inner worth over outward display, of substance over style, redolent of inner virtue" [Turner, p. 252]. Go figure.

A cinnamon plant can be grown in all 50 states, but you must carry it indoors whenever the temperature is below 40 degrees. (Be sure you plant it in a pot rather than in the ground.) These trees are easy to maintain, but making cinnamon is difficult not only because you have to summon up the courage to cut down your tree but also because the process in involved (see above).

The e-mail on vanilla (22 May 2015) pointed out that coumarin, which is a constituent of tonka beans, an adulterant of vanilla, is banned since it is suspected to cause liver damage. Cassia contains a small amount of coumarin. If you consume vast quantities of cassia, you could be putting yourself in danger. As the NIH states, "Cassia cinnamon contains coumarin, the parent compound of warfarin, a medication used to keep blood from clotting. Due to concerns about the possible effects of coumarin, in 2006, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment warned against consuming large amounts of cassia cinnamon."

This site give the most complete analysis I have seen of cinnamon toast. See the appendix for more on cinnamon toast.

Cinnamon is not produced by the cinnamon fern (pictured below), which grows at High Mowing, Mei-Mei's place in Vermont.


Since cinnamon is such a well known spice, I will not attempt a full discussion of its uses but will limit myself to some of its uses around your mouth.
  • Are you into brown lipstick? Do you want your lips to look like autumn leaves? Then try the Cinnamon Spice brand from Milani cosmetics.The pictures below shows the tube of lipstick (along with other brown shades) and a close-up of the extended lipstick. (Not offered in vegan.)
  • If you seek a power smile, then try the mouthwash Jason Power Smile, the cinnamon mint flavor.
  • Keep your mouth kissable with Trident gum. Despite the packaging that trumpets its cinnamon flavor and is dominated by cinnamon sticks, it is artificially flavored and presumably contains no cinnamon.
  • Finally, from the galaxy of foods that contain cinnamon, I select cinnamon rolls, which were my second favorite food when I was a child. Pictured are cinnamon rolls that look much like the ones my mother made.
 
    
   

Cinnamon Art

Cinnamon has a very modest presence in art works.
  • A Bulgarian living in Vienna has invented a method of painting with cinnamon. Take a look at his portfolio, one of which is shown below.
  • Cinnamon bun painting.

   

Travel Tip

To get the full cinnamon experience, visit the world's only Cinnamon Museum in Mirissa, Sri Lanka, a few minutes from beautiful Weligama Bay. The Museum, which doubles as a four-room hotel, is located in the heart of a working cinnamon plantation, which you can observe in action. The picture of the hotel room below shows that, with artificial cinnamon flowers scattered on the bedspread, the cinnamon motif is fully exploited. (Are the curtains around the bed mosquito netting, or is that just gracious living?) If the rooms are all taken, here is an alternative plantation tour, which can be combined with a tour of the Tea Virgins Tea Factory.


Rick

Appendix: Cinnamon Toast

While on the porch of Pepe and Maria's Lake House on the evening of 29 July 2015, Mike and I were relaxing from our labors of picking blueberries. (Below is a picture of me standing in the lake while picking highbush blueberries.) I was telling Mike what I had found out about cinnamon, and this got us to talking about cinnamon toast. Our experiences were similar in that it was a favorite food as a child, but we had not had any in roughly half a century. This created a burning desire to try cinnamon toast.


On 1 August 2015, I was back home and had assembled the ingredients. Here's what I did.
  • I scooped into a bowl what I figured was enough butter for two slices of toast.
  • I threw in what seemed like the right amount of sugar. (Damn the unhealthy ingredients, full speed ahead. This is fruit exploring.)
  • I shook in what seemed to be the right amount of cinnamon. See picture of these ingredients in the bowl.
  • I mashed all the ingredients together with a fork until it was a smooth paste. See picture.
  • I spread the mixture on two slices of bread and put them on a cookie sheet. See pictures of both slices and a close-up of the slice on the left..
  • Making use of my avocado stove, I put the bread into an oven pre-heated to 350 degrees for ten minutes; see picture. It was exciting after seven minutes to look in and see the mixture bubbling. My excitement grew when a minute later I could smell the cinnamon. (I skipped the step recommended by this site of putting the bread in the broiler for a few minutes to glaze the surface; I will save this touch for when the Queen comes to visit and I serve her cinnamon toast. For this first trial, I did not use any other ingredients like vanilla extract or nutmeg.)
  • I took the toast from the oven and let it cool on the stovetop for four minutes. See picture.
  • I ate the cinnamon toast.
 
 
 
 
 

I found that the cinnamon toast tasted good, but the cinnamon flavor was not strong enough. Maybe I didn't use enough cinnamon, but I think the bigger problem is that my cinnamon was two years old, and it was cheapo cinnamon to begin with. 

My plan, after eating the cinnamon toast, had been to eat dinner; sometimes, just for a change of pace, I eat dessert before the main course. Instead, I decided to take advantage of the experimental mood and make two more pieces. This time I followed the same procedure except that I roughly doubled the amount of cinnamon, and I also dumped in a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. (I bought a bottle when I wrote the e-mail on vanilla, 22 May 2015, and figured I would find some use for it. The elapsed time since I bought it doesn't matter since, as you might recall from that e-mail, vanilla extract lasts forever without losing its potency.)

When the next two, enhanced slices were ready, I ate them. They were good, as they should be from the ingredients, but not noticeably better than the first two slices. I could not detect the effect of the extra cinnamon or the vanilla extract. In short, cinnamon toast no longer exerted its childhood allure. I guess the phrase, "You can't go home again," applies also to cinnamon toast.

After eating the second batch, I found that all desire to eat dinner was extinguished.

On 3 Nov 2015, using Ceylonese cinnamon just purchased at Penzeys Spices, I made cinnamon toast again. This was a test of my theory that the quality of my first two batches reported on above was held down by using old cinnamon. The result was that the cinnamon toast tasted the same as before. I guess I have to admit that the cinnamon toast phase of my life is over, and I have moved on to the garlic hummus phase.

References

Herodotus (edited by Robert B. Strassler), The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, Pantheon Books, 2007. I own four editions of Herodotus that I have bought over the last 35 years, and this one is my favorite because it does so much to help the reader and make the text comprehensible. For example, it has 127 maps, very full notes, 21 appendixes to explain the larger topics, and other scholarly apparatus. Note that my reference to this work is not by page number but by book and paragraph. This is the standard way to refer to Herodotus; this means that a reader can check my citation no matter what edition he or she has at hand. (I just had the idea of looking to see if there is a version of Herodotus on-line. I went to http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.3.iii.html and found to my intense irritation that the paragraph numbers were not given. I then went to http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2707/2707-h/2707-h.htm#link32H_4_0001 and was gratified to see that the paragraphs were numbered, as they were in the Greek-English parallel version at http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hh/hh3110.htm. That I found these three on-line editions of Herodotus in two minutes and saw a number of others in Google that I didn't look at gives me hope for the future of the human race. We might go extinct, but it will not be for lack of access to Herodotus. By the way, Herodotus might be the most entertaining book I ever read. Give it a try.)

Keay, John, The Spice Route A History, University of California Press, 2006. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015. 

Krondl, Michael, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice, Ballantine Books, 2007. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.

Russell-Wood, A.J.R., The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808: A World on the Move, Johns Hopkins, 1998 (first published in England in 1992 under a different name). I did not read this book but just picked out a few facts. I had access to this book in hard copy.

Turner, Jack, Spice: The History of a Temptation, Vintage Books, paperback, 2005 (first published in hardback in 2004). For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.