Origin: Maritime Southeast Asia, likely the islands of the Indo-Malay Archipelago (modern Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines)
Ginger (Zingiber officinale) is a true cultigen: a plant that exists only under human cultivation and has no confirmed wild population anywhere on earth in its present form. The species belongs to the Zingiberaceae, the great tropical family of rhizomatous aromatics that also gave the kitchen turmeric, galangal, cardamom, and the lesser gingers, and like its relatives it is grown not for a seed or a fruit but for its rhizome, the swollen, branching, pungent underground stem that the cook mistakes for a root. Its wild progenitor is thought to have grown somewhere across Maritime Southeast Asia, very likely in the humid lowland forests of the Indo-Malay Archipelago, but no certainly wild stand of Z. officinale has ever been found, and the plant that the world now eats is wholly a creature of human hands.
The reason for this is biological and decisive: cultivated ginger is sterile, or very nearly so. It rarely flowers, almost never sets viable seed, and is propagated instead by dividing the rhizome and replanting the pieces, so that every ginger plant grown across the tropics is, in effect, a clone, a living cutting passed from gardener to gardener and from island to island across some seven thousand years. This vegetative habit explains both the plant's antiquity and its dependence upon us. The earliest Austronesian and pre-Austronesian cultivators of the archipelago, gathering and replanting the rhizomes that smelt and tasted strongest, selected over countless generations for size, for the intensity of the volatile oils, and against the woody fibre that toughens an old rhizome, until they had shaped a plant that could no longer survive without a human being to lift it, break it, and bury it again.
The pungency they were selecting for resides in two families of compounds that define ginger's character and its medicine alike. The fresh rhizome owes its bright, hot, lemony bite to the gingerols, above all to 6-gingerol; when ginger is dried or cooked, the gingerols are slowly transformed into the shogaols, which are hotter and more penetrating, and into the gentler, sweeter zingerone, so that dried ginger and fresh ginger are, in effect, two different spices with two different flavours and two different uses. This single chemical fact underlies the whole culinary history of the plant, for it is why the fresh rhizome rules the kitchens of its Asian homeland whilst the dried, ground spice came to rule the baking and the mulled wines of medieval and early modern Europe, which knew ginger almost entirely in its dried form. From one sterile, much-divided rhizome, then, the world received a green aromatic, a warming dried powder, a preserved sweetmeat, a confection, a medicine, and a drink, all of them the same plant wearing different faces.
Ginger's spread across the world is the story of a single living rhizome carried, replanted, and re-rooted along nearly every trade route the Old World ever opened. From its homeland in Maritime Southeast Asia it travelled first along two great axes. Westward, through the Austronesian and Indian Ocean networks, it reached the Indian subcontinent well before 2000 BCE, where it struck deep roots in both the kitchen and the clinic: the Sanskrit physicians named it viśvabheṣaja, 'the universal medicine', and made it a cornerstone of Ayurveda, whilst the cooks of the Malabar coast wove it into the sweet, sour, and fiercely hot cooking that would make Kerala the spice coast of the world. Eastward, the same rhizome moved into China, where it joined scallion and garlic to form the holy trinity of the wok, and onward into Korea and Japan, each of which bent it to entirely distinct ends.
From India the rhizome passed into the hands of the Arab and Persian merchants who controlled the monsoon trade, and through them it reached the classical Mediterranean. The Greeks knew it, and the Romans prized it extravagantly: ginger appears throughout the recipes of Apicius, and Pliny the Elder records that it was imported from the lands of the Red Sea and could be coaxed to grow in a Roman pot. Crucially, it arrived already dried and powdered, stripped of any memory of the green rhizome and of the islands that grew it, so that for the whole of antiquity and the Middle Ages Europe knew ginger only as a costly brown dust whose origin was a mystery and a rumour. So valuable was that dust that medieval reckonings put a pound of ginger at the price of a sheep, and apothecaries kept it under lock; through the monsoon-borne trade of the Arab dhow captains it also became a defining spice of the Swahili coast, of Morocco's palace kitchens, and of the slow tagines of the Maghreb.
The second age of ginger's travels was opened by the European voyages of discovery, which at last connected the dried spice to a living plant that could be moved. Here a decisive thing happened: because ginger propagates from a rhizome rather than a seed, a colonising power could carry the plant itself, not merely its produce, and grow it wherever the climate allowed. The Portuguese and the Spanish did exactly this. Spanish colonists introduced ginger to Jamaica, whose volcanic soils produced a rhizome of such pungency that by the eighteenth century Jamaican ginger dominated the London market, and the Atlantic slave economies that grew it gave the New World its own ginger traditions, from the fermented ginger beer of the Caribbean to the dark treacle gingerbreads of the diaspora. Portuguese contact and trans-Saharan trade together carried it deep into West Africa, where it married dried hibiscus to make the crimson zobo of Nigeria and the wider Sahel. Carried by the Dutch East India Company's human cargo to the Cape, it became a signature of Cape Malay cooking; carried to Brazil, it warmed the winter festivals of the Northeast; and carried at last to the subtropical valleys of Queensland in the late nineteenth century, it founded the Southern Hemisphere's own commercial ginger industry. From a sterile rhizome of the Indo-Malay forest, ginger had reached, in dried, fresh, pickled, candied, and fermented form, very nearly every cuisine on earth.
Ginger is amongst the most widely used spices on earth and very probably the most thoroughly studied of all culinary plants in the modern laboratory. Its active compounds, the gingerols of the fresh rhizome and the shogaols and zingerone produced when it is dried or cooked, have been credited in clinical research with genuine anti-nausea, anti-inflammatory, and digestive effects, and the old folk remedy of ginger for sickness, for the queasy stomach, and for the cold has been quietly vindicated by science. India is by a wide margin the world's largest producer, followed by China, Nigeria, and Nepal, and a steady global appetite for the rhizome, fresh in the supermarket aisle and dried in the spice rack alike, has only grown as Asian cooking has spread.
No other single spice serves such radically divergent purposes across the world's kitchens, and it does so by being, in effect, several ingredients at once. As a fresh aromatic it is grated, julienned, pounded, or juiced: charred over a flame for the broth of Vietnamese phở, stir-fried in batons for Thai pad khing, simmered with scallion over steamed Cantonese fish to draw out any trace of the sea, and pressed for the raw, blazing juice that lifts a marinade. As a dried and ground spice it is the warming heart of European baking, of British gingerbread and parkin, of Nuremberg's Lebkuchen and the speculaas of the Low Countries. Pickled into the blush-pink gari, it cleanses the palate between courses of sushi; crystallised in syrup, it becomes a sweetmeat and the soul of a stem-ginger cake; fermented with sugar and lime, it makes the fierce ginger beer of Jamaica; and steeped with hibiscus, lemongrass, or cardamom, it is the base of drinks from West African zobo to Indian masala chai to the quentão of a Brazilian winter festival. From the gentle sweetness of candied ginger to the cleansing bite of the pickled slice, from the mellow warmth of a long-braised rhizome to the raw fire of its juice, ginger remains the great shape-shifter of the spice world, equally at home in the medicine chest, the bakery, the bar, and the wok.
Historical Journey of Ginger
Borneo / Malay Archipelago, Maritime Southeast Asia — c. 5000 BCE
Across the islands of the Indo-Malay Archipelago, the homeland of so many of the world's aromatics, the people of Borneo and the surrounding seas selected and propagated Zingiber officinale from its wild Zingiberaceae ancestors, lifting and replanting the rhizomes that smelt strongest and bit hardest until they had shaped a plant that could no longer reproduce without them. They learnt that the volatile oils of the rhizome, the gingerols above all, preserved food in a hot climate, masked the smell of ageing fish and meat, and settled a disordered stomach, and so ginger became at once a seasoning, a preservative, and a medicine. Because it set no viable seed and grew only from the divided rhizome, every plant was a clone passed from hand to hand, making ginger one of the earliest and most complete examples of a crop wholly created by human selection. Through the Austronesian trading canoes it spread island to island across the archipelago and out into the wider Pacific and Indian Oceans, the rhizome itself travelling as living cargo. The deep aromatic cooking of the region still carries this inheritance: rendang, the dark, slow-cooked dry curry of West Sumatra in which beef is simmered for hours in coconut milk and a pounded paste of ginger, galangal, turmeric, lemongrass, and chilli until the liquid all but vanishes and the spices caramelise onto the meat, is a direct descendant of the archipelago's ancient mastery of the warming, preserving rhizome.
Kerala, South India — c. 2000 BCE
By the second millennium before the common era ginger had crossed the Bay of Bengal into the Indian subcontinent, where it found a home so complete that the plant has been claimed as Indian ever since. The Sanskrit physicians named the dried rhizome śṛṅgavera and the Tamil cooks of the south called the fresh one inji, and both the Vedic texts and the earliest Ayurvedic pharmacopoeias set ginger amongst the most important of all medicinal plants, the viśvabheṣaja or universal remedy, warming, digestive, and cleansing. Nowhere did it strike deeper than on the Malabar coast of Kerala, the spice country that would in time draw the ships of half the world, where it became fundamental to the daily cooking of the Nair, Syrian Christian, and Muslim communities alike. The sweet, sour, salt, and fiercely hot balance of the Keralan table found its purest expression in inji puli, a dark, glossy pickle of ginger simmered with tamarind and jaggery, tempered with mustard seed and curry leaf, and seasoned until every one of the four cardinal tastes stands clear; it is set on the sadhya, the great vegetarian feast served on a banana leaf, as the small, intense relish against which the milder dishes are measured. From the same kitchens came the habit of steeping crushed ginger and other warming spices into sweet, milky tea, the masala chai whose fragrance would one day fill every railway platform and street corner of South Asia.
Yellow River Valley, China — c. 1000 BCE
Carried north and east out of Southeast Asia, ginger reached the Yellow River heartland of early China, where it was documented in the texts of the Zhou dynasty and in the writings attributed to Confucius, who, the Analects record, was never without ginger at his table and ate a little of it with every meal. The Shennong Bencao Jing, the foundational pharmacopoeia of Chinese medicine, lists it amongst the fundamental healing herbs, warming to the stomach and a dispeller of cold and damp. In the kitchen the Chinese made of ginger something even more pervasive than a medicine: together with scallion and garlic it forms the aromatic trinity that begins very nearly every savoury dish, the fragrance released into hot oil that defines the smell of a Chinese kitchen. Ginger's particular and prized office is to drive off the xing, the fishy or gamey rankness of flesh, and nowhere is this shown more elegantly than in qīng zhēng yú, the Cantonese steamed whole fish laid over fine slivers of ginger and scallion, steamed only minutes until just set, then anointed with sizzling oil and a little soy: a dish in which the ginger does not flavour so much as purify, leaving the fish tasting more cleanly of itself. The rhizome reached as well into the cooling drinks of the Chinese summer, simmered with watermelon and a little sugar into a fragrant, thirst-quenching beverage that balances the season's heat with the spice's gentle fire.
Rome, Italy — c. 100 CE
Ginger reached imperial Rome along the Arab and Indian maritime spice routes, arriving already dried, ground, and entirely stripped of any memory of the Southeast Asian islands that grew it; to the Roman cook it was simply a precious brown powder of mysterious eastern origin. The Romans took to it readily. The first-century recipe collection that bears the name of Apicius, the De Re Coquinaria, uses ginger freely alongside pepper, cumin, and coriander in its sauces for meat and its spiced wine preparations, and Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, reports that the spice was brought from the lands of the Red Sea, valued for its warming, digestive virtue, and could even be coaxed to grow in a pot in a Roman garden. One characteristic use was the oxyporum, a pungent digestive condiment of the Apician table in which ginger was pounded with cumin, rue, and other warming spices into a paste taken to settle the stomach after a heavy meal, the ancestor of every after-dinner digestif. Rome thus fixed the European taste for ginger and the European habit of knowing it only in its dried form, a taste that would survive the fall of the empire and carry through into the Middle Ages, when ginger became, after pepper, the most widely traded and most universally used spice in the whole of European cooking.
Fez, Morocco — c. 700 CE
As Arab and Berber merchants consolidated both the trans-Saharan caravan routes and the Indian Ocean monsoon trade, Morocco, and the great spice city of Fez above all, became a major centre for the processing and redistribution of ginger drawn from East Africa and from India. Moroccan palace cooking absorbed the rhizome into a spice philosophy of extraordinary subtlety, one that prized layering, balance, and the marriage of the warm with the sweet and the sour. From this culture came ras el hanout, the spice merchant's masterpiece blend whose name means 'the head of the shop', a fragrant mixture that might hold a dozen or two dozen spices with ginger amongst its anchors, and from it came the slow-cooked tagine, the conical earthenware vessel in which meat, ginger, saffron, and preserved lemon braise for hours into the characteristic warm, sweet, and sour Moroccan profile. The most resplendent expression of this art is mrouzia, the great ceremonial lamb tagine of the feast days, in which the meat is cooked down with honey, almonds, raisins, and a generous measure of ginger and ras el hanout until it is dark, glossy, and yielding, the sweetness of the honey and dried fruit held in balance by the ginger's heat and the saffron's bitterness. Traditionally prepared at Eid al-Adha to preserve the festival meat, mrouzia stands at the summit of Moroccan feasting and shows how completely ginger had naturalised itself, by way of the Arab spice routes, into the cooking of the Maghreb.
Kyoto, Japan — c. 800 CE
Ginger reached Japan from China, carried with the great flow of continental learning, writing, and cookery that shaped the early Japanese court, and the Japanese named it shōga, after the Chinese shēngjiāng. In the refined kitchens of Kyoto and the wider country it settled into two quite distinct and almost opposite roles, each of which became a fixture of the table. As a cooked aromatic it cuts and balances richness: in shōgayaki, the beloved everyday dish of thin pork slices fried and glazed in a sauce of grated ginger, soy, mirin, and sake, the ginger's sharpness lifts the fatty meat and gives the dish its name, for shōga is ginger and yaki is grilled. As a raw, pickled condiment it cleanses and resets the palate: gari, the wafer-thin slices of young ginger steeped in sweetened rice vinegar that blush a pale pink, is set beside sushi not to be eaten with the fish but between one piece and the next, a few slices clearing the mouth so that each successive fish may be tasted as cleanly as the first. One preparation is cooked, warming, and assertive, the other raw, cooling, and quietly purifying, and between them they mark the two poles of ginger's range, the same rhizome serving as both the flavour and its eraser at a single Japanese meal.
Mombasa, Swahili Coast (modern Kenya) — c. 1000 CE
The Arab dhow captains who rode the monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean made ginger one of the defining spices of the Swahili coast, the great mercantile civilisation that fused African, Arab, Indian, and Persian influences along the East African littoral from Mogadishu to Kilwa, with Mombasa amongst its busiest harbours. Carried in the same holds as the cloth, the porcelain, and the dates, the rhizome wove itself into the Swahili spice tradition alongside cardamom, cumin, black pepper, and the cloves grown on the Zanzibar archipelago just offshore. Its supreme expression is pilau, the fragrant spiced rice of the coast, a dish descended from the Persian polo and cousin to the Indian biryani but made wholly the Swahili coast's own: rice cooked in a richly spiced broth with meat, the grains stained and perfumed by a pilau masala in which ginger stands amongst the essential aromatics, alongside cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, and black pepper. Cooked for weddings, for the breaking of the Ramadan fast, and for every occasion of consequence, pilau became the ceremonial rice of the entire Swahili-speaking world, the centrepiece of the festive table from Lamu to Dar es Salaam. In its layered, monsoon-borne spicing, ginger amongst them, the dish records the whole history of the Indian Ocean trade that brought the rhizome to Africa's eastern shore.
London, England — c. 1200 CE
Medieval England became one of the most ginger-besotted nations in all of Europe. By the thirteenth century the dried rhizome was, after pepper, the second most heavily traded spice in the realm, dear but available, and it found its way into very nearly everything: into meat pies and pottages, into spiced wine and ale, into sauces sharp and sweet. It appears in almost every recipe of The Forme of Cury, the great cookery roll compiled around 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II, confirming its place at the centre of the medieval English kitchen. Out of this obsession the English bakers made something new: gingerbread, at first a dense pressed confection of breadcrumbs, honey, and a great deal of ground ginger, moulded and sometimes gilded, which over the centuries evolved into the baked honey loaf and at last into the crisp biscuit. This was the first European food built around ginger for its own sake rather than using the spice as one seasoning amongst many, and the gingerbread of the medieval fairs, sold at markets across England and northern Europe, founded a whole lineage of British ginger baking. From it descend the dark, sticky Yorkshire parkin of oatmeal and treacle, eaten around the bonfires of the fifth of November, and the elegant stem-ginger biscuit studded with nuggets of young ginger preserved in syrup, a tradition of warming, treacly, ginger-scented baking that remains, to this day, one of the most distinctively English uses of any spice.
Ayutthaya, Thailand — c. 1400 CE
The kingdom of Ayutthaya, the great cosmopolitan capital of the Siamese, sat at the crossroads of the overland and maritime spice routes that bound together India, China, and the Malay world, and its kitchens drew freely upon all three. Thai cooking absorbed ginger alongside its near cousin galangal, known in Thai as kha, and made between the two rhizomes a precise distinction that is rarely so carefully observed elsewhere: galangal, sharper and more medicinal, for the soups and the curry pastes, and ginger, warmer and cleaner, for the stir-fries and certain sauces. The clearest showcase of ginger in its own right is pad khing, a quick stir-fry in which chicken or pork is tossed over high heat with a generous quantity of julienned young ginger, wood-ear mushrooms, onion, and a sauce of oyster sauce and soy, the ginger appearing not as a hidden background note but as a principal ingredient, eaten in fragrant, gingery shreds. Young ginger, harvested before its fibres toughen, is essential here, mild enough to be eaten by the forkful, and the dish is prized as much as a restorative as a pleasure, the kind of clean, warming plate a Thai cook makes for someone feeling out of sorts. In drawing this fine line between the two rhizomes and in letting ginger stand at the centre of a savoury dish, the Siamese kitchen treated the spice with a discrimination all its own.
Jamaica, Caribbean — c. 1585 CE
Ginger, introduced to Jamaica by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, found in the island's deep volcanic soils and humid tropical climate conditions that produced a rhizome of extraordinary pungency, hotter and more aromatic than almost any other in the trade. So prized did Jamaican ginger become in the markets of Europe that by the eighteenth century it dominated the London spice trade and lent its name to a standard of quality. It was grown, however, by the enslaved Africans of the sugar islands and, after emancipation, by Indian indentured labourers, and it was these communities, drawing on deep West African and South Asian traditions of fermented and spiced drinks, who created the island's great original contribution: Jamaican ginger beer, a naturally fermented, fiercely hot drink made from fresh grated ginger, sugar, lime, and the wild yeasts of a 'ginger bug', brewed at home and bottled live, fizzing and burning on the tongue. It stands amongst the genuinely new food traditions born in the New World. Through the imperial connection ginger also entered the British baking canon by way of the island: Jamaican ginger cake, dark and heavy with black treacle and intensified with chopped stem ginger, became one of the most beloved cakes of both the Caribbean and Britain, moist, sticky, and deeply warming, the dried-ginger gingerbread tradition of medieval England married to the fierce fresh ginger of the tropics.
Nuremberg, Germany — c. 1600 CE
Nuremberg, sitting astride the great Central European trade roads down which the spices of the East flowed northward from Venice, became the world capital of Lebkuchen, the deeply spiced honey cake that represents the most sophisticated of all European transformations of ginger into a confection. So specialised was the craft that the city's guild of Lebkuchen bakers, the Lebküchner, had broken away from the ordinary bakers' guild as early as 1395 to form a trade of their own, and they guarded their recipes jealously. Lebkuchen drew upon a spice palette, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, anise, mace, and nutmeg, that reads like a map of the global spice trade itself, every aromatic in the cake a thread reaching back to a distant tropical coast, and bound it all with honey, nuts, and candied peel into a dense, fragrant, keeping cake. Nuremberg's position amongst the orchards and beekeepers of Franconia gave the bakers their honey, and its place on the spice roads gave them their ginger, and the marriage of the two made the city's name. When the Nuremberg Christmas market, the Christkindlesmarkt first recorded in 1628, rose to fame, Lebkuchen became the defining confection of the whole European winter festival, sold warm and spiced in the cold air of the market square. In it the medieval European love of dried ginger reached its most refined and most enduring form.
Lagos, Nigeria — c. 1700 CE
Ginger entered West Africa along two paths that met in the markets of the coast: first overland, carried south across the desert by the trans-Saharan Arab caravan trade, and later by sea, reinforced by Portuguese contact along the Guinea shore, and from these beginnings it became a key ingredient across the region's cooking and, above all, its drinks. In the Yoruba lands of southwestern Nigeria, with Lagos at their heart, ginger joined forces with the dried calyces of the roselle, the sorrel hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa, known as zobo leaf), to make zobo, a vivid crimson infusion that is at once sour, spiced, and intensely refreshing. The deep red, tart liquor of the steeped hibiscus is sharpened and warmed by a generous hand of fresh ginger, sweetened to taste, and brightened with citrus and sometimes pineapple, and the result is one of the most beloved non-alcoholic drinks of the whole of West and Central Africa. Served cold from great jugs at celebrations, weddings, and naming ceremonies, hawked in chilled sachets in the markets and at the roadside, and brewed at home in every household, zobo crosses every line of class and faith across Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and the wider Sahel. In its marriage of hibiscus tartness to ginger's fire, the drink shows how thoroughly the rhizome, a stranger carried in across the desert and the sea, had naturalised itself into the everyday refreshment of West Africa.
Cape Town, South Africa — c. 1700 CE
The Cape Malay community, formed from the enslaved and exiled people brought by the Dutch East India Company to its Cape Colony from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Madagascar, and Mozambique from 1652 onwards, created one of the great fusion cuisines of the Southern Hemisphere, and ginger lay close to its heart. Carrying with them the Southeast Asian and Indian ginger traditions of their homelands, these communities of Cape Town's Bo-Kaap quarter built a spice vocabulary unlike any other on the African continent, in which ginger, turmeric, cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves are combined in patterns that recall the very spice routes their ancestors had once sailed and been carried along against their will. The clearest emblem of this inheritance is boeber, a warm, sweetened milk drink thickened with sago pearls and fine vermicelli, perfumed with cardamom and rose water, and warmed through with ginger. By long tradition it is made on the fifteenth night of Ramadan, the midpoint of the fast, and carried in covered bowls from house to house so that neighbours share it across the lanes of the Bo-Kaap, an edible expression of community, of memory, and of a remembered home half a world away. The same ginger that warms the boeber also scents the syrups in which the community preserves fruit, including the whole green figs of the Cape's vye konfyt, gently spiced with ginger, binding the Malay kitchen into the wider preserving traditions of the Cape.
Pernambuco, Brazil — c. 1800 CE
The Portuguese introduced ginger, which they called gengibre, to Brazil in the sixteenth century, but it is in the folk celebrations of the Northeast, and of Pernambuco in particular, that the rhizome found its most distinctively Brazilian expression. The Festas Juninas, the June festivals that honour the Catholic saints' days of Saint Anthony, Saint John, and Saint Peter, fall in the cool, dry heart of the Southern Hemisphere winter, and they are warmed by quentão, whose name comes from quente, meaning hot. It is a steaming drink of cachaça, Brazil's fierce sugarcane spirit, simmered with a great deal of fresh ginger, cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, and brown sugar until it is dark, fragrant, and burning, then ladled into small cups against the night chill of the bonfire and the quadrilha dance. Quentão is Brazil's answer to mulled wine, seasonal, communal, tied to one particular cycle of festivals, and judged above all by the intensity of its ginger fire, the heat of the spice standing in for the heat of the absent summer. The Festas Juninas were transformed by the enslaved and free African communities of the Northeast into joyous events of forró music, quadrilha dancing, and the corn-based foods of the maize harvest, and within that exuberant, syncretic festival ginger became, through quentão, the ceremonial warming drink of an entire region.
Buderim, Queensland, Australia — c. 1880 CE
The subtropical climate of the Queensland coast, with its deep volcanic red soil, its summer monsoon rains, and its mild winters, proved ideal for the commercial cultivation of ginger, and in the ranges around Buderim, north of Brisbane, Chinese market gardeners and Melanesian labourers, many of them brought to the colony to cut sugarcane, established ginger growing through the 1880s and 1890s. Out of these beginnings grew the Buderim Ginger Cooperative, formally established in 1941, which became in time the largest ginger processor in the Southern Hemisphere, supplying crystallised and preserved ginger to the world. This homegrown ginger culture fed directly into the Australian baking tradition. The Australian ginger nut biscuit, markedly harder and more pungent than its softer British cousin and made deliberately tooth-resistant so that it might be dunked in a cup of tea without crumbling, achieved a kind of cult status; manufactured by Arnott's from 1906, it has remained one of the country's best-loved biscuits ever since. Across the Tasman Sea, New Zealand developed in the same decades its own beloved ginger sweet, ginger crunch, a slice of buttery, ginger-spiced shortbread base topped with a thick, glossy, set icing of butter, golden syrup, and yet more ground ginger; codified in the Edmonds Cookery Book, first published in 1908 and a fixture of nearly every New Zealand kitchen since, ginger crunch is found in every bakery and at every fundraising stall in the land, the antipodean inheritance of the old European love of dried ginger baking.
Hanoi, Vietnam — c. 1900 CE
Vietnamese cooking had carried ginger from its earliest days, both through the Chinese-influenced cuisine that took root during the long Han colonisation of the Red River Delta and through the Cham and Khmer flavour traditions of the south, but the most iconic Vietnamese use of the rhizome emerged only in the early twentieth century, when the cooks of the north, around Hanoi, perfected phở. The defining technique of this celebrated beef-bone broth turns upon ginger: before it is dropped into the simmering pot, a thick knob of fresh ginger, together with whole onions, is charred directly over an open flame, held above a gas burner or laid in a dry, blazing pan until the cut surfaces blacken and blister. This charring works a transformation, driving off the raw rhizome's sharp, green, almost soapy edge and conjuring in its place a deep, smoky, caramelised sweetness that is the very soul of phở's aroma; without the charred ginger and onion, the broth of phở bò is flat and unrecognisable, lacking the haunting fragrance that rises from the bowl. From the street stalls of Hanoi the dish spread the length of Vietnam, and then, carried by the great Vietnamese diaspora that scattered across the world after 1975, into the cities of America, France, Australia, and beyond, until the charred-ginger broth had become one of the single most influential and most widely loved techniques in all of twentieth-century cooking.
