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Ginger East to West: A cook's tour with recipes, techniques and lore
143 pages, Paperback
First published January 21, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 31, 2020
Older books always seem to contain hidden historical gems that no one ever discusses anymore. For example:
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" Z. officianale is a member of the Zingiberaceae family ... these include tumeric and galangal, and seed pods of several species of the ginger family known as cardamoms."
"Ginger spiced up the [English} language as well as the cuisine when it invaded England sometime before the Norman Conquest of 1066... it even had a cannister of its own at the table..."
"Applying the name Ginger to redheaded females because of their supposed hot temperaments was standard in Elizabethan England..."
"Jamaica and its ginger plantations were taken from Spain by England in the 1670's. Slaves planted and harvested thousands of tons..."
"A brief treatise, Seeking the Root of Sapors... suggests that the founding rulers of the Shang Dynasty (18-12th centuries BC) were able to pinpoint a small region in Sichuan Province, hundreds of miles from their northern capital, where the finest ginger specimens were grown."
"At the birth of a child, a knob of ginger was tacked on the entryway of Chinese homes to absorb the harmful character traits of any visitors, a practice that has disappeared only recently."
"During the Chou period (1200 to 221 BC) Chinese cooking as we know it emerged."
"Chopsticks were adopted... 2500 years before Europeans stopped using their hands."
"The Han culture (206 BC to 220 AD) introduced the noodle to China, perhaps to mankind. The world's oldest surviving pasta dish may be the famous Beijing birthday noodle dish, za jiang mein.... hardly been tampered with for 2000 years."
"Cooking methods are also characterized as yin or yang. Those that use water are more cooling than those that use oil.... People themselves may have yin conditions that require heavily gingered foods. When a woman has just given birth, she is in an extreme yin state."
"The Chinese consider ginger a de-fisher, meaning it suppresses any hint of fishiness in even the freshest of fish. The first time I found a chunk of ginger and scallion in the bag when I bought a whole fish in New York's Chinatown, I thought it was a mistake, but it kept happening."
"Ginger is used in Chinese vegetable dishes to rid them of their raw taste... but most commonly with the earthy cabbage family, which is central to the Chinese diet."
"The Chinese palate is perhaps the most finely attuned to how food feels in the mouth. The cut of the ingredients is almost as important as the ingredients themselves in determining the worth of a dish."
"... Preparing these crabs are popular. In one method, called 'drunken crabs', they are allowed to expire swimming in shao hsing and salt, then cracked and eaten uncooked - a Chinese sashimi."
"The duck in this recipe is simmered with fresh ginger, wine, and scallions, then marinated in a rich paste pungent with bean sauce, five-spice powder, and fermented red bean curd, the closest the Chinese come to a cheese."
"In the currency of the spirit world, ginger is gold." - Laotian saying
"Besides the ginger flower, Laotians use a number of exotic buds or floral hearts in their cooking, including the male bud or heart of the banana plant, and lotus flowers."
"The Indians were the first to cook an indigenous jungle fowl known today as chicken. While it is an inexpensive source of protein welcomed around the world, in India its enjoyment is limited to persons of some means."
"Vegetables may be main courses... They are cooked far longer than crisply colorful Chinese vegetables... This gives the spices a chance to permeate the dish... In the Indian view, the natural flavors of the vegetable are awakened by the correct application of seasonings regardless of cooking time."
"We get our pickling techniques from the English, who got theirs directly from India. Even the dill pickle is probably of Indian origin... cucumber cultivation in India goes back at least 3000 years."
"Sugarcane is thought to be native to the Bay of Bengal, where it spread throughout South Asia and was a staple crop before the sweet-crazy West had an inkling of its existence."
"The caravan trails heading west out of India are approximately 5000 years old... but these routes over mountains and through deserts were not conducive to transporting anything fresh... Etymylogical sleuthing has turned up words for ginger in Assyrian and Babylonian, antecedents of Latin by 1000 years or so... Turmeric may have preceded ginger in the West, since the word for it apparently did. Ginger in Assyrian translates as 'turmeric of the mountain'".
"Ginger (skinjbir) in Morocco is sold by grade, according to origin and curing method. The top grade is bleached pure white (skinjbir bied), also known as limed ginger, and is favored throughout the Middle East. India is its usual source."
"The Arabs introduced dried ginger to the ancient Greeks, and for centuries held onto the Western franchise for all Eastern spices by keeping the sources secret."
"... The Romans lusted after... enormous quantities of spice, especially the hot ones, [black] pepper and ginger... These spices were among the essential luxuries that were the basis of Rome's foreign trade... The government reportedly earned substantial sums from a luxury tax imposed on ginger. Some citizens complained about its artificially high price ; ginger, though more plentiful than black pepper, at one point sold for 15 times as much."
"...Ginger comes from the Sanskrit sringavera, meaning horn root."
"Ginger undoubtedly got a boost from Europe's first medical center, the famed school at Salerno... The regimen at Salerno was based on Greek ideas, which in turn harked back to the very earliest notions of diet and health in China."
"Three [medieval] sauces, which were the forerunners of condiments such as mustard and catsup, were popular : a yellow sauce, dominated by ginger and saffron ; a green sauce, with ginger, cloves, cardamom, and fresh herbs ; and a cinnamon sauce cameline which often contained more ginger than cinnamon."
"The Venetians bought their spices at Alexandria and Damascus - some 5000 tons annually, half of which were ginger and pepper. When Marco Polo encountered ginger in China, he was amazed at its price - next to nothing by Venetian standards. Upon reaching Venice, ginger was as good as currency. In fact, a pound each of ginger, pepper, and cinnamon, was demanded annually of Venetian merchants by their master of the treasury in order to let their goods enter Europe without the usual red tape."
"Ginger industries set up by the Spanish in Jamaica and by the Portuguese in Sierra Leone are still going strong."
"...Peanut stews of West Africa that manifest themselves in the vatapa dishes of Brazil... are thought to have originated... in their homeland... from South America's peanuts, tomatoes, and chili peppers, which were introduced to West Africa by the Portuguese."
"The origin of the notorious gingerbread man is often credited to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, where important visitors were presented with charming likenesses of themselves in gingerbread."
"Long before Elizabeth, German bakers were creating works of art from gingerbread. They are thought to have adapted the spiced honey cakes of the Middle East that they encountered during the Crusades."
"Nuremberg, to this day, reigns as the gingerbread capital of the world. Soon after the Crusades it became a center of the spice trade, as tons of ginger, pepper and cinnamon came over the Alps from Venice. The lush forests surrounding the city were soon filled with beekeepers, who supplied the honey..."
"Gingerbread makers were recognized as artists rather than cooks, and guilds were established that separated the bakers of pain d'epice from the bakers of day-to-day breads."
"French experts, tracing their own distinguished pain d'epice... attribute all to an ancient Chinese honey bread known as mi-kong, which was rationed to the followers of Genghis Khan."
"In the early 1800's, Salem Massachusetts was the world's number one spice port."
"Ginger wines, with a base of fermented grains, were used in sacrificial rites in ancient China.... The most interesting was a turmeric wine of the early Chou Period (12th - 2nd centuries BC) that required court employees devoted exclusively to its manufacture and the rituals of its presentation."
"The alcoholic drinks known interchangeably as ginger beer and ginger ale were first popularized by the British. They imported a taste for this type of beer to their colonies in the Caribbean where their slave cooks adapted recipes using fresh ginger ... and lime instead of lemon."
"{Native tribes] of Nicaragua make a powerful chicha, a liquor from fresh ginger, as well as the more traditional corn chicha..."
"Marco Polo wrote of vendors hawking threads of sweetened ginger on Chinese streets."
" 'The plant which repels dampness' was the first definition for the character symbolizing ginger in Chinese. Dampness was a major concern in ancient China. It was assigned responsibility for chills, ague, spasms, tetanus, and leprosy..."
" 'When consumed for a long time, fresh ginger eliminates body odors and puts a person in contact with spiritual effulgences' according to the most ancient Chinese pharmacopaeia...Shen Nung Pen Ts'ao, Materia Medica of the Divine Agrarian, circa 2nd century AD."
"That ginger leaves one internally clean and sweet-smelling, thus presentable to the gods, was not without empirical support.... it was used by the Chinese and Indians to counteract any hints of rankness or foul odor in food."
"Ginger was the Alka-Seltzer of the Roman Empire, which evidently needed all the help it could get."
"Beyond curbing nausea, ginger stimulates the flow of saliva, and is recommended to be taken in some form before meals for loss of appetite."
"If using ginger is a fad, so is walking upright."
.
-------
" Z. officianale is a member of the Zingiberaceae family ... these include tumeric and galangal, and seed pods of several species of the ginger family known as cardamoms."
"Ginger spiced up the [English} language as well as the cuisine when it invaded England sometime before the Norman Conquest of 1066... it even had a cannister of its own at the table..."
"Applying the name Ginger to redheaded females because of their supposed hot temperaments was standard in Elizabethan England..."
"Jamaica and its ginger plantations were taken from Spain by England in the 1670's. Slaves planted and harvested thousands of tons..."
"A brief treatise, Seeking the Root of Sapors... suggests that the founding rulers of the Shang Dynasty (18-12th centuries BC) were able to pinpoint a small region in Sichuan Province, hundreds of miles from their northern capital, where the finest ginger specimens were grown."
"At the birth of a child, a knob of ginger was tacked on the entryway of Chinese homes to absorb the harmful character traits of any visitors, a practice that has disappeared only recently."
"During the Chou period (1200 to 221 BC) Chinese cooking as we know it emerged."
"Chopsticks were adopted... 2500 years before Europeans stopped using their hands."
"The Han culture (206 BC to 220 AD) introduced the noodle to China, perhaps to mankind. The world's oldest surviving pasta dish may be the famous Beijing birthday noodle dish, za jiang mein.... hardly been tampered with for 2000 years."
"Cooking methods are also characterized as yin or yang. Those that use water are more cooling than those that use oil.... People themselves may have yin conditions that require heavily gingered foods. When a woman has just given birth, she is in an extreme yin state."
"The Chinese consider ginger a de-fisher, meaning it suppresses any hint of fishiness in even the freshest of fish. The first time I found a chunk of ginger and scallion in the bag when I bought a whole fish in New York's Chinatown, I thought it was a mistake, but it kept happening."
"Ginger is used in Chinese vegetable dishes to rid them of their raw taste... but most commonly with the earthy cabbage family, which is central to the Chinese diet."
"The Chinese palate is perhaps the most finely attuned to how food feels in the mouth. The cut of the ingredients is almost as important as the ingredients themselves in determining the worth of a dish."
"... Preparing these crabs are popular. In one method, called 'drunken crabs', they are allowed to expire swimming in shao hsing and salt, then cracked and eaten uncooked - a Chinese sashimi."
"The duck in this recipe is simmered with fresh ginger, wine, and scallions, then marinated in a rich paste pungent with bean sauce, five-spice powder, and fermented red bean curd, the closest the Chinese come to a cheese."
"In the currency of the spirit world, ginger is gold." - Laotian saying
"Besides the ginger flower, Laotians use a number of exotic buds or floral hearts in their cooking, including the male bud or heart of the banana plant, and lotus flowers."
"The Indians were the first to cook an indigenous jungle fowl known today as chicken. While it is an inexpensive source of protein welcomed around the world, in India its enjoyment is limited to persons of some means."
"Vegetables may be main courses... They are cooked far longer than crisply colorful Chinese vegetables... This gives the spices a chance to permeate the dish... In the Indian view, the natural flavors of the vegetable are awakened by the correct application of seasonings regardless of cooking time."
"We get our pickling techniques from the English, who got theirs directly from India. Even the dill pickle is probably of Indian origin... cucumber cultivation in India goes back at least 3000 years."
"Sugarcane is thought to be native to the Bay of Bengal, where it spread throughout South Asia and was a staple crop before the sweet-crazy West had an inkling of its existence."
"The caravan trails heading west out of India are approximately 5000 years old... but these routes over mountains and through deserts were not conducive to transporting anything fresh... Etymylogical sleuthing has turned up words for ginger in Assyrian and Babylonian, antecedents of Latin by 1000 years or so... Turmeric may have preceded ginger in the West, since the word for it apparently did. Ginger in Assyrian translates as 'turmeric of the mountain'".
"Ginger (skinjbir) in Morocco is sold by grade, according to origin and curing method. The top grade is bleached pure white (skinjbir bied), also known as limed ginger, and is favored throughout the Middle East. India is its usual source."
"The Arabs introduced dried ginger to the ancient Greeks, and for centuries held onto the Western franchise for all Eastern spices by keeping the sources secret."
"... The Romans lusted after... enormous quantities of spice, especially the hot ones, [black] pepper and ginger... These spices were among the essential luxuries that were the basis of Rome's foreign trade... The government reportedly earned substantial sums from a luxury tax imposed on ginger. Some citizens complained about its artificially high price ; ginger, though more plentiful than black pepper, at one point sold for 15 times as much."
"...Ginger comes from the Sanskrit sringavera, meaning horn root."
"Ginger undoubtedly got a boost from Europe's first medical center, the famed school at Salerno... The regimen at Salerno was based on Greek ideas, which in turn harked back to the very earliest notions of diet and health in China."
"Three [medieval] sauces, which were the forerunners of condiments such as mustard and catsup, were popular : a yellow sauce, dominated by ginger and saffron ; a green sauce, with ginger, cloves, cardamom, and fresh herbs ; and a cinnamon sauce cameline which often contained more ginger than cinnamon."
"The Venetians bought their spices at Alexandria and Damascus - some 5000 tons annually, half of which were ginger and pepper. When Marco Polo encountered ginger in China, he was amazed at its price - next to nothing by Venetian standards. Upon reaching Venice, ginger was as good as currency. In fact, a pound each of ginger, pepper, and cinnamon, was demanded annually of Venetian merchants by their master of the treasury in order to let their goods enter Europe without the usual red tape."
"Ginger industries set up by the Spanish in Jamaica and by the Portuguese in Sierra Leone are still going strong."
"...Peanut stews of West Africa that manifest themselves in the vatapa dishes of Brazil... are thought to have originated... in their homeland... from South America's peanuts, tomatoes, and chili peppers, which were introduced to West Africa by the Portuguese."
"The origin of the notorious gingerbread man is often credited to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, where important visitors were presented with charming likenesses of themselves in gingerbread."
"Long before Elizabeth, German bakers were creating works of art from gingerbread. They are thought to have adapted the spiced honey cakes of the Middle East that they encountered during the Crusades."
"Nuremberg, to this day, reigns as the gingerbread capital of the world. Soon after the Crusades it became a center of the spice trade, as tons of ginger, pepper and cinnamon came over the Alps from Venice. The lush forests surrounding the city were soon filled with beekeepers, who supplied the honey..."
"Gingerbread makers were recognized as artists rather than cooks, and guilds were established that separated the bakers of pain d'epice from the bakers of day-to-day breads."
"French experts, tracing their own distinguished pain d'epice... attribute all to an ancient Chinese honey bread known as mi-kong, which was rationed to the followers of Genghis Khan."
"In the early 1800's, Salem Massachusetts was the world's number one spice port."
"Ginger wines, with a base of fermented grains, were used in sacrificial rites in ancient China.... The most interesting was a turmeric wine of the early Chou Period (12th - 2nd centuries BC) that required court employees devoted exclusively to its manufacture and the rituals of its presentation."
"The alcoholic drinks known interchangeably as ginger beer and ginger ale were first popularized by the British. They imported a taste for this type of beer to their colonies in the Caribbean where their slave cooks adapted recipes using fresh ginger ... and lime instead of lemon."
"{Native tribes] of Nicaragua make a powerful chicha, a liquor from fresh ginger, as well as the more traditional corn chicha..."
"Marco Polo wrote of vendors hawking threads of sweetened ginger on Chinese streets."
" 'The plant which repels dampness' was the first definition for the character symbolizing ginger in Chinese. Dampness was a major concern in ancient China. It was assigned responsibility for chills, ague, spasms, tetanus, and leprosy..."
" 'When consumed for a long time, fresh ginger eliminates body odors and puts a person in contact with spiritual effulgences' according to the most ancient Chinese pharmacopaeia...Shen Nung Pen Ts'ao, Materia Medica of the Divine Agrarian, circa 2nd century AD."
"That ginger leaves one internally clean and sweet-smelling, thus presentable to the gods, was not without empirical support.... it was used by the Chinese and Indians to counteract any hints of rankness or foul odor in food."
"Ginger was the Alka-Seltzer of the Roman Empire, which evidently needed all the help it could get."
"Beyond curbing nausea, ginger stimulates the flow of saliva, and is recommended to be taken in some form before meals for loss of appetite."
"If using ginger is a fad, so is walking upright."
.
March 28, 2008
a good and detailed book...! i love to cook,and ginger too... and this book is so yummy...hehehe..
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews