Ginger the great

Aromatic, tingling, spicy, pungent and warming, ginger adds bursts of flavour to your cooking, but this plant, favoured around the world, also packs a powerful healing punch.

- TERRY ROBSON

If the events surrounding COVID-19 have taught us nothing else (and they have offered lessons aplenty) they have shown us how easily we take things for granted. Joni Mitchell put that simple truism into lyric form when she sang, “You don’t know want you’ve got till it’s gone”, and COVID-19 showed us that something as fundamental as social interaction can be taken away in a heartbeat. Appreciation is a powerful mental state and an under-practised skill, so let’s take a moment to acknowledge a ubiquitous food, probably underrated by many due to its very commonness, the rhizome we all know and love: ginger.

A world of appreciation

What do ancient Chinese sailors, Jacobean English taverns and ancient Roman banquets have in common? No, the answer isn’t “pigtails” (although the judges may well accept that response). The thematically minded reader will have leapt to the conclusion that the mot juste is, in fact, “ginger”. To explain the link, we just have to wander down History Lane and discover as we do so that it is a thoroughfare crowded with cultures from around the world that have valued this ugly little root.