Ginger

Ginger is a very important and versatile culinary spice of wide acclaim, but did you know that it is also an extremely powerful healing herb? Ginger is the most popular of hundreds of members of the Zingiberacea family. To be botanically correct, ginger is a rhizome and not a root. It is available in many varieties, from mild to spicy, and requires tropical conditions and fertile soil for optimum growth.

Over millennia, millions of people have enjoyed the benefits of ginger. For spiritual upliftment, digestive comfort and strength, stimulation and relief from infirmity, ginger has been heralded as the herb of choice, and has been included in most traditional Eastern formulas. Ginger is aptly described in the traditional language of Sanskrit as “vishwabhesaj”, the universal medicine.

Ginger has been used historically for wound healing, as an analgesic, anti-arthritic, anti-ulcer, as a stimulant, as well as a powerful treatment for a variety of respiratory, reproductive, and digestive complaints. Ginger also shows great therapeutic potential in the treatment of arthritis and cardiovascular disorders, and as a probiotic support.

The anti-nausea effect of ginger is well documented. Although I didn’t know it at the time, ginger was one of the main ingredients in the carsickness medicine I occasionally took as a young lad.

My first culinary experience of ginger was in 1974 in steamy West Bengal, while visiting the holy city of Sridham Mayapur. On the first morning, about one hundred others and I sat side by side, cross-legged and expectant, along the cool marble-tiled verandas of the Chandrodaya Temple. Cool breezes wafted in from the serpentine Mother Ganges that slithered majestically through nearby rice fields This was to be our first meal in India – a multi-course breakfast feast, in fact.

While memories of the exact menu have faded, I distinctly recall the elegant yet simple entree – buttery chickpeas, served with wafer-thin slices of tender young ginger with paper-thin pinkish skin and greenish-ivory flesh, drenched in fresh lime juice and sprinkled with salt. It was a sublime and tantalising experience that the subsequent quarter century of eating experiences has not erased.

Ginger still remains one of my well-loved kitchen favourites. I relish its spicy, sweet aroma, its invigoratingly clean, hot sharp taste, its digestive properties, and its cleansing effect on the body.

I’ll leave you with a delightful recipe for fresh ginger chutney by Yamuna Devi, from her wonderful book 'Yamuna's Table'

Fresh Ginger Chutney

This is great as a refreshing accompaniment to virtually any savoury.

Preparation time: about 10 minutes
Makes about 1½ cups

3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1/3 cup fresh orange juice
¾ cup peeled fresh ginger, coarsely chopped
½ cup diced dried papaya (or any dried fruit of your choice)
½ cup fresh or dried grated coconut
1½ teaspoons salt

Place the lime juice and half the orange juice in a blender or food processor.

Add all the remaining ingredients, and process for about 1 minute.

Uncover and scrape down the sides of the container, then add the remaining orange juice, and reduce the ingredients to a smooth puree.

Transfer to a ceramic or stainless steel bowl, and cover until ready to serve.

Ginger - plant profile

Names
Ginger (English)
Srngaveram (Sanskrit)
Adrak (Hindi, Urdu)
Sont (Hindi, dried ground ginger)

Botanical name: Zingiber officinale
Family: Zingiberaceae, the ginger family

The closely related Zingiber montanum and Zingiber zerumbet are also cultivated in India. Like ginger, they are used as a spice.

Botanical names are often derived from their ancient names. The word Zingiber is a good example. It is thought to come from the Sanskrit word singabera which was from Arabic and Greek words meaning 'shaped like a horn'. It probably got its name because the rhizomes look like deer's antlers.

The plant

Ginger plants can grow to about 1 m tall. The upright shoots sprout from the rhizome at the base of the plant.

Ginger plant

Rhizomes - knobbly and fleshy, covered in ring-like scars. This is the important part for food and medicine. Although the rhizomes grow underground, they are swollen stems, not roots. This is why fresh ginger is often referred to as 'stem ginger'.

Flowers - the flowering spikes sprout directly from the rhizomes and are about 30 cm long. The flowers are purple with a cream-blotched base.

Fruits - red in colour. Each has three chambers containing several small black seeds. Ginger plants that are cultivated in commercial plantations don't usually bear fruit.

Ginger beer plant Mature Fruit

All over the British Isles people used to relish a frothy, fizzy, gingery, alcoholic beer which was made at home. All you needed was a bit of sugar, ginger, water and a ginger beer 'plant'. But it wasn't a typical green, leafy kind of plant. It was a sloppy, white mass that lived in a jam jar.

Popular drink

It would be regularly 'fed' with sugar and every so often the liquid would be tapped off, diluted and bottled. The liquid would ferment in the bottle, producing the fizz. After about a week or so it was ready to drink. The plant was treated like a chain letter. As it grew it was halved and passed to family and friends.

Mystery 'plant' revealed

No one has ever worked out where the first ginger beer plants came from, but the mystery of its identity was solved by a pioneering scientist in the late nineteenth century. Harry Marshall Ward studied how plants and microorganisms live together in symbiotic relationships. He became curious when a friend at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, gave him a ginger beer plant. As the years passed he built up a whole collection of ginger beer plant specimens and painstakingly identified, separated and attempted to grow the different organisms within the mixtures.

His analyses revealed that it was a type of organism new to science. He described it as a 'composite body', consisting of many microorganisms living together. Not all of these microbes helped in making the beer, but two organisms were present in every sample, and seemed vital to the production of ginger beer.

One was a fungus he named Saccharomyces pyriformis. The other was a bacterium, which he named Bacterium vermiforme, and is now called Brevibacterium vermiforme. Together, they produce the essential ingredients of traditional ginger beer: carbon dioxide and alcohol.

The popularity of the ginger beer plant died out. The commercial, canned ginger beer of today is very different. It doesn't contain alcohol and isn't made by fermentation.

Ginger – food

Ginger is a popular spice worldwide. In Asia, it is mainly used in the form of fresh rhizomes, peeled then grated or chopped. Its aroma has been described as ''rich and warm, with a refreshing, woody note and sweet, citrus undertones''. It is a versatile spice that works well in savoury and sweet dishes in many culinary traditions.

Flavouring and food

Often paired with garlic, fresh ginger is a key ingredient in many South Asian savoury dishes. In the north of India, garlic, ginger and onion are often pounded together to make a paste which is then fried to form the basis of vegetable and meat dishes. In southern India, chillies and turmeric replace the onion.

Not all communities appreciate ginger: many Jains consider ginger to be a prohibited food, alongside other tubers.

Preserved ginger - pieces of ginger rhizome in a sugar syrup - is a popular ingredient in sweet dishes in South Asia. Fresh ginger is often pickled in vinegar in southeast Asia. In Japan pickled ginger is known as as 'gari' and 'beni-shoga' and eaten with sushi.

Until recently, most ginger exports were in the form of dried, powdered ginger. This is the form in which ginger was used in ancient Rome and medieval Europe. In Europe ginger was used on all kinds of food in the medieval period, but since the 18th century, mainly in baked goods such as gingerbread. Ginger beer is a non-alcoholic soft drink, popular in the West Indies and in Britain. It can be made with fresh or powdered ginger. Home-made ginger beer is a refreshing drink in summer.

With the increasing popularity of Asian cooking, fresh ginger is now widely available. If frozen after peeling and grating, fresh ginger can conveniently stored for home use.

Ginger - traditional medicine

Ginger rhizomes owe their popularity as much to their medicinal virtues as their food uses. For more than 5,000 years people have valued their 'hot' and 'warming' qualities. Today the rhizomes are commonly used in Asian medicine to treat rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, sore throats, to improve circulation and reduce fat deposits in the arteries. Ayurvedic practitioners, use ginger rhizomes as a cure for cholera, anorexia and 'inflamed liver'. Many of these traditional medicinal properties are supported by recent scientific research.

Ginger remedies

Image: This minor ginger species, cassumunar ginger, was grown for medicinal uses.
Medicines containing ginger come in a variety of forms. The fresh or dried rhizome can be made into teas and tinctures, or powdered and put into capsules.

Pastoral communities in the southern India state of Tamil Nadu use ginger as a folk medicine to treat cattle suffering from gastric upset. They feed the ginger rhizome to cattle in the form of a herbal paste mixed with black pepper, asafoetida (Ferula species) and sweet flag (Acorus calam)

Ginger – food

Ginger is a popular spice worldwide. In Asia, it is mainly used in the form of fresh rhizomes, peeled then grated or chopped. Its aroma has been described as ''rich and warm, with a refreshing, woody note and sweet, citrus undertones''. It is a versatile spice that works well in savoury and sweet dishes in many culinary traditions.

Flavouring and food

Image: An Al Halal supermarket in Bradford has a wide range of fresh goods on sale.
Often paired with garlic, fresh ginger is a key ingredient in many South Asian savoury dishes. In the north of India, garlic, ginger and onion are often pounded together to make a paste which is then fried to form the basis of vegetable and meat dishes. In southern India, chillies and turmeric replace the onion.

Not all communities appreciate ginger: many Jains consider ginger to be a prohibited food, alongside other tubers.

Preserved ginger - pieces of ginger rhizome in a sugar syrup - is a popular ingredient in sweet dishes in South Asia. Fresh ginger is often pickled in vinegar in southeast Asia. In Japan pickled ginger is known as as 'gari' and 'beni-shoga' and eaten with sushi.

Until recently, most ginger exports were in the form of dried, powdered ginger. This is the form in which ginger was used in ancient Rome and medieval Europe.

In Europe ginger was used on all kinds of food in the medieval period, but since the 18th century, mainly in baked goods such as gingerbread. Ginger beer is a non-alcoholic soft drink, popular in the West Indies and in Britain. It can be made with fresh or powdered ginger. Home-made ginger beer is a refreshing drink in summer.

With the increasing popularity of Asian cooking, fresh ginger is now widely available. If frozen after peeling and grating, fresh ginger can conveniently stored for home use.