Ginger

Ginger is the pungent underground stem of Zingiber officinale, a plant of tropical Asia cultivated since antiquity and among the earliest of eastern spices to reach the West along the trade routes. Its most famous devotee is Confucius, whom the Analects record as never being without ginger when he ate, a small, precise detail of the sage's temperate way of life that fixed the spice in the Chinese moral imagination as a wholesome and clarifying food. Warming and stimulating to the taste, ginger was valued across Asia and Europe both in the kitchen and, as folk history records, as a comforting remedy for the cold stomach.

Ginger is one of the better-evidenced traditional remedies discussed in this atlas: multiple clinical trials and systematic reviews have found real, if modest, benefit for nausea, including morning sickness in pregnancy and nausea following chemotherapy, findings solid enough that ginger is recommended by some clinical guidelines as a genuine adjunct treatment rather than being dismissed as folklore, a comparatively rare case of an ancient warming remedy holding up reasonably well under modern controlled study. It is worth noting that this evidence concerns nausea specifically, and does not extend to the much wider range of ailments ginger has traditionally been recommended for, a distinction worth keeping in mind when weighing an old reputation against what has actually been tested.

In the correspondence traditions ginger is a hot, fiery and stimulating root, associated with fire, with power and with the quickening of any working: it was added to charms to give them speed and strength, and used in spells for money, success and love, on the principle that its heat kindled and hastened. In parts of the Pacific ginger was chewed and used in ritual and healing practice. Its symbolism follows plainly from the sensation it gives, a warmth that spreads and rouses, so that the spice of the warmed body became the spice of energy, drive and the heating-up of fortune. A homely kitchen root, ginger carries a consistent meaning of warmth, vigour and force.

Ginger was also one of the first Asian spice plants successfully transplanted to the New World by European colonists: Spanish growers introduced it to the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, and Jamaica in particular became, and remains, a significant producer of ginger prized for its quality, so that a plant whose ritual and medicinal reputation was built in Confucian China and ancient India came, within a few generations of European contact, to be grown commercially on the far side of the world. Jamaican ginger's reputation for superior flavour and heat is still cited by chefs and spice merchants today, a modern commercial echo of an introduction now approaching five hundred years old.