Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was an impressive woman; prioress of the Benedictine convent of Disibodenberg, founder of the community of cloistered sisters in nearby Rupertsberg, the composer of twenty-seven symphonic compositions, author of works on stones, fish, reptiles, metals, plants, and medical remedies, and a celebrated visionary “who imagined the presence of divinity… [to be] accessible in the earth’s plant matter.” Whether or not Saint Hildegard (she was canonized in 2012) perceived divinity in ginger is unknown but one thing is certain. She was hesitant to recommend its ingestion.[1] Ginger, she warned, “is an injurious food for a healthy or fat person. It makes him ignorant, languid, and lewd.”[2] These warnings having been stated, she nonetheless went on to recommend ginger as an effective purgative. Others also believed the spicy rhizome to be healthful, however, they maintained that its benefits lay elsewhere. The Benedictine monk, physician, and translator of a treatise on sexual intercourse, Constantine the African (died before 1098/99) touted ginger, as well as cloves and cinnamon, as an aphrodisiac, its spiciness viewed as a stimulus that fueled burning desire and enflamed heated passion.[3]
Hermann Adolph Köhler (1834-1879), Medizinal Pflanzen zenzero, 1887
Such aphrodisiacal value aside, the medicinal benefit of ginger had been noted in the west for almost a thousand years before Hildegard von Bingen and Constantine the African were born. Citing as his authoritative source the first century text De materia medica, Galen (129-217), who has been called the Father of Medicine, recognized ginger’s “warming” and digestive property, stating that it “softens moderately the belly, being good for the stomach.”[4] The influential philosopher-physician Avicenna (980-1037) concurred, noting further that it improves memory by ridding the head of excess fluid. Papal account books indicate that medical theory was put into practice. In 1340, a “whopping thirty-two pounds of ginger” were consumed by Pope Clement VI (Papacy 1334-1352), who was suffering stomach aches.[5] The quantity is impressive and while few were able to get their hands on such a large amount, it was to be had, and not only in a single variety. La pratica della mercatura, a commercial handbook compiled shortly before 1340 by a Florentine banker with experience in the Eastern spice trade, lists three kinds among 288 itemized spices.[6]
Cookbooks are far less specific when it comes to variety (aswathy vs. karthika vs. maran vs. himgiri, etc.) but they do record a widespread use. Johannes Bockenheim, a German ecclesiastic, cook and probable author of Registrum Coquine, circa 1430-1435, put ginger in “Hare with Black Peppery Sauce”, “Chicken or Pigeon Pastillum”, and it is most likely that ginger was one of the “sweet spices” he added to “Pork Liver for Pimps”.[7] In this respect, Bockenheim’s Registrum Coquine follows De re coquinaria (On the Matter of Cooking), a book of recipes attributed to the first-century Roman gastronome Apicius but one that was likely written at the close of the fourth century or the beginning years of the fifth. De re coquinaria includes ginger in some twenty dishes.[8] By the seventeenth century, the sweetness of ginger was exploited. Hugh Plat’s Delights for Ladies to Adorne their Persons, tables, closets, and Distillatories, with Beauties, Banquets, Perfumes and Waters, 1630, includes a recipe for ginger candy. “Take a quarter of a pound of the best refined sugar… powder it: put thereto two spoonfuls of Rosewater: dip therein your Nutmegs, Ginger roots &c.” These days, confectioners have taken Mr. Plat’s recipe a step further, dipping candied ginger in dark chocolate.
Whatever the health benefits of ginger may or may not be – and here it is worth noting that today researchers in Ohio assert that ginger is more effective against seasickness than Dramamine, Japanese scientists say it works as a cough suppressant, researchers in India argue that it lowers cholesterol, and so on – in medieval times two things were uncontested. 1) Ginger was not cheap and 2) it adds zip to cocktails. Concerning the price of ginger, a pound of ginger root cost roughly three-and-a-half times a carpenter’s earnings per day in the Kingdom of Navarre in the early fifteenth century, or roughly the price of a sheep in England.[9] The high cost can be explained by the distance ginger traveled from Asian fields to European markets. Indeed, and as Marco Polo (1254-1324) noted, ginger was neither rare nor costly in Fu-chau (Fuzhou, China). Here, said Polo, “ginger and galingale are superabundant… for a Venetian groat you could buy a quantity of fresh ginger equivalent to 80 lb.”[10]
Tractatus de Herbis, 1559. (earliest surviving version, circa 1330)
As for the second point, any beer drinker knew full well that ginger enriched the taste of ale. Wine makers also recognized ginger’s palate-pleasing quality. In his recipe for Gascoigne wine in The Treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets, and may be called The Huswiues Closet, of health-full prouision…, 1573, John Partridge included “gynger” among the ingredients.[11] In truth, spices such as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, coriander, and anis had been added to bitter wine as a sweetener since antiquity. Ginger continues to be used in alcoholic concoctions not so much for the sweetness it contributes but for the zing it adds. In The Drunken Botanist, 2013, Amy Stewart adds ginger liqueur to a Sake Cocktail. Ginger beer, which is traditionally a mixture of water, sugar, lemon, ginger, and yeast, is essential to her Moscow Mule.[12]
Today some 43% of the ginger that is available around the world comes from India. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that many of us are familiar with its taste through Indian cuisine. Nor is it surprising that Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published just three years after the governance of India was transferred to the British Crown from the East India Company in 1858, included a recipe for “Indian Chetney Sauce” [sic], a combination of sour apples, tomatoes, sugar, cayenne pepper, shallots and ginger. I buy my chutney or, if I am lucky, have some made from local produce by my brother and sister-in-law. I do, however, make my own Lahori chicken curry, which calls for a medley of “sweet spices”: cinnamon, mustard seed, cloves, cardamon, pepper, and, of course, ginger.[13] The combination is wonderful.
- & CHEERS….. & thanks for reading my musings. It has been fun.
John Partridge, Recipe for Gascoigne wine in The Treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets, and may be called The Huswiues Closet, of health-full prouision…, 1573.
The Receipt. Take a Gallon of good Gascoyne Wyne: then take Gynger, Gallyngale, Camamyll, Cynamon, Nutmegs, Grains Cloues, Mace, Annys seedes, Fenel seedes, Carawayes seedes: of euery of them a dram. Then take Sage, Myntes, Redroses, Time Pelittory of the Wall, Wylde Margeru, Rosemarie, Peny moutayne: otherwise called Wilde Time, Camamyll, Lauender and Auens, of eueri of them one handful: Then beate ye Spices small, and bruse the Herbs, & put al into the Wine: and let it stand. xii. howres: styrringe it diuers times: Then stil it in a Limbeck, and keep the fyrst pint of the water, for it is the best: then wil come a second water, which is not so good as ye fyrst.
[1] Sara Ritchey, “The sacrificial herb: Gathering prayers in medieval pharmacy,” Postmedieval, vol. 9 (2018), page 434.
[2] Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica, tans. Priscilla Throop (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998), pages 17-19.
[3] Paul Freedman, Out of the East. Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008), pages 72-73.
[4] Alain Torwaide and Emanuela Appetiti, “Herbs in History: Ginger.” https://www.ahpa.org/herbs_in_history_ginger
For Galen on ginger, see Hygiene, book VI. 15.
“In the Greek tradition alone, there are over thirty extant illustrated copies of Dioscorides’ treatise, De materia medica. The oldest illustrated copy …contains over 300 illustrations of plants…” Sarah R. Kyle, Medicine and Humanism in late medieval Italy. The “Carrara Herbal” in Padua (New York: Routledge, 2017), page 32.
[5] Jack Turner, Spice: The History of Temptation (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), page 126.
[6] Freedman, Out of the East, page 11.
[7] Marco Gavio de Rubeis, Early Italian Recipes. Vegetables Fruit, Herbs, and Flowers (Historical Italian Cooking/I Doni delle Muse, 2022), page 56. Anonimo Toscano, Libro de la Cocina, ed. and trans. Marco Gavio De Rubeis (Historical Italian Cooking/I Doni delle Muse, 2022), page 229. For two examples
(Hare with black pepper sauce and Chicken or Pigeon Pastillum, see Johannes Bockenheim, Registrum Coquine [circa 1430-1435], A Medieval Cookbook,intro. and trans. Marco Gavio de Rubeis (Historical Italian Cooking/I Doni delle Muse, 2021), pages 106-107; 119-120.
[8] Torwaide and Appetiti, “Herbs in History: Ginger.” https://www.ahpa.org/herbs_in_history_ginger
[9] Turner, Spice: The History of Temptation, page 46; Freedman, Out of the East, page 127-128.
[10] Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham(London: Penguin Books, 1958), page 231.
[11] John Partridge, The Treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets, and may be called The Huswiues Closet, of health-full prouision. Mete and necessarie for the profitable vse of all estates both men and women: And also pleasaunt for recreation, With a necessary Table of all things herein contayned, Gathered out of sundrye Experiments lately practised by men of great knowledge. By I. Par. Imprinted at London by Richard Iones. 1573. https://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/treasurie.pdf
[12] Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist. The plants that create the world’s great drinks (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013), pages 166-167.
[13] For several recipes, see Suvir Saran and Sephanie Lyness, Indian Home Cooking (New York: Clarkson Potter/ Publishers, 2004), pages 111-114.
pulcinellapasta 