ISSUE 63, ALL THINGS GINGER, Part 1: Ginger Gravy
Ginger Gravy
Of all the exotic Asian plants, pepper and ginger most excited the diners of Europe during the age of exploration. Their fiery, spicy accents in sauces, baked goods, soups, and meat main courses made them memorable, desirable, and bankable. There were reasons for the fascination that went beyond the sensations of taste. Under the old humoral understanding of how the body operated, the fluids that controlled health, mood, and even personality—choler, bile, water ((phlegm), and blood were regulated by what you ingested. Each edible item had its own properties that correlated with the humors. If you were a wishy wash phlegmatic person, eating something hot and dry would straighten you up.
When English projectors began organizing colonial settlement of North America, they pondered what items in the tropics, in the orient, or in the islands could be transplanted and naturalized to the territories under the control of the empire. When Britain wrested control of Jamaica from Spain in the 1650s, they found ginger growing there—material transplanted from South Asia. The English understood their constitutional effected was their citizens phlegmatic dispositions. So England expanded the ginger plantings in Jamaica and planned for South Carolina to nurture the crop in the 1870s. Planters in Jamaica did not much favor the setting up of a rival source for their commodity and thwarted the expansion of ginger cultivation in North America.
Jamaican ginger became a pantry fixture. It could be pickled, candied, dried and reduced to a powder, or sold fresh. A short list of brands became know. Woodman’s Extract of Jamaican Ginger. Reddington’s Jamaican Ginger. The ginger ale, ginger bread, and ginger pudding all were fueled by imported roots.
The English engaged in a kind of magical thinking about ginger. Not only would ginger beer and ginger ale cure the overly phlegmatic disposition of Britons when imbibed directly, it would supply a corrective to that most emblematic of English foodstuffs—rare roast beef. Beef was a sanguine food. Ginger added to beef would make it a double counter to the islanders’ watery constitution. Hence the creation of ginger gravy. (This was not an exclusively English idea: there are formulations of sauerbratten that are quite ginger heavy.)
In the United States the old tradition of ginger gravy survives in the South—in Texans use of ginger gravy with beef brisket, and its use to accompany either beef or pork roasts in Georgia and South Carolina. This recipe from the April 5, 1967 issue of the Atlanta Journal captures a dish prepared from East Texas to Salem, NC.