On Food and Cooking

Ginger was domesticated in prehistoric
times somewhere in southern Asia, had been
brought in dried form to the Mediterranean by
classical Greek times, and was one of the
most important spices in medieval Europe.
The cake known as gingerbread dates from
this time; ginger beer and ginger ale from the
19th century, when English taverns sprinkled
powdered ginger on their drinks.
To make the dried spice, mature rhizomes
are cleaned, scraped to remove most of the
skin, sometimes treated with lime or acid to
bleach them, and then dried in the sun or a
machine. Dried ginger is about 40% starch by
weight. Today the main producers of dried
ginger are India and China, while Jamaican
ginger is considered one of the finest. A
surprisingly large fraction of the ginger trade
goes to Yemen, where it is added to coffee (as
much as 15% of the coffee’s weight).
In Asia, and increasingly in the rest of the
world, ginger is used fresh. Most fresh ginger