Handle Gingerly

While shopping for Thanksgiving goodies at the grocery store, I ran into a friend who was digging around in the produce section, looking for the fattest hand of ginger he could find. “Whatcha cookin’? I asked. “This isn’t for cooking,” he replied, “it’s for after the cooking. It helps settle your stomach after you over-indulge, which I certainly intend to do.”

Being unversed in the use of strange looking vegetables to ease the pain of overeating vegetables, I immediately did a little research. First of all, ginger is a spice, not a vegetable, even though it looks like it should be peeled and boiled into submission. Actually, to be precise, ginger is a rhizome. It grows underground as a thick, tuberous stem with roots and shoots. Somewhere along the line, it forms itself into a grotesque shape vaguely resembling a human hand. An added bonus is that it sprouts up a beautiful green plant which may or may not bear flowers if you live in the tropics somewhere. Don’t count on any flowers around here though if you grow your own ginger in Southside Virginia.

While you may want to try growing ginger just for the challenge, it would probably be cheaper just to buy it at the grocery store. In the hotness of the tropics, ginger rhizomes are harvested about nine months after planting by digging them up carefully with a hoe. They are then cleaned, scraped and boiled and allowed to dry in the sun for about a week. India is the largest producer of ginger, but the highest quality ginger comes from Jamaica. And that brings me to Christmas…

Shopping for a present for The Neighbor was nothing short of a challenge. I won’t say he’s hard to impress, but deciding on just the right thing to wrap up was a real conundrum. Finally, I found myself in a previously unexplored antique shop, and there it was…just the thing I was looking for, only I didn’t know I was looking for it. Molded in the shape of a mule’s head, this little porcelain cup (when turned upside down) was not only about my age, which qualifies it to be in an antique store, it still had the original Missouri Mule drink recipe sticker on the top. Included in the list was ginger beer, not something most folks keep in their pantry. So, off to the grocery store again in search of the illusive beverage.

I was surprised to find that our local store did indeed have ginger beer on the shelf, and although it was produced somewhere ‘way north of Jamaica, the label claimed that the brewery used the finest Jamaican ginger in its drink. One sip told me I wasn’t going to add ginger beer to my shopping list again anytime soon, but it was nice to know it’s there if I change my mind.

Other than being part of an alcoholic mixed drink, ginger is used to flavor all sorts of food, make the famous snap, or distilled and used in lotions and potions. Ginger also has a spot in history, having been a common article of medieval and Renaissance trade and used as currency. Just in case you need to resort to some “horse trading,” in the Middle Ages a pound of ginger would buy you a pretty nice size sheep.