Bob Nold mentioned: "What you find in American grocery stores is cassia, Cinnamomum aromaticum (or C. cassia). Where you have large Hispanic populations, as here, the regular grocery stores also carry real cinnamon (C. verum), called canela;"
I've also read that "true" cinnamon is the preferred cinnamon in England and Germany. "Cassia" is cinnamon to most of us here in the US. For those of us who grew up with this sort of cinnamon (i.e. cassia), the taste of "true" cinnamon is apt to be a bit puzzling. You'll keep adding more and more of the stuff trying to get the cinnamon taste you're used to. Although "true" cinnamon has a bit of the cassia cinnamon taste and smell, to me "true" cinnamon has a musty, stale, faded cassia smell with citrus overtones. It reminds me of the smell of a shop which used to sell English imports in a local mall. Whenever I was in that shop, I used to wonder how many people knew what that smell was. Long ago, when I discovered that what we thought was cinnamon was an "imposter", I couldn't wait to taste the "real true cinnamon". It was a big disappointment, right up there with my first whiff of white truffle infused oil (which to me smells like dead rat0. Jim McKenney
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