Ginger, and my childhood obsession with it.

My mother is going to kill me for this.

Well, she’s actually more forgiving than that, thank goodness. One of my major fears is that in writing about my food habits, I’m going to paint her as a poor parent. She certainly had her strengths and weaknesses. We all do. One of her lesser strengths was her cooking.

Her organizational abilities have saved me in the kitchen countless (and I mean countless) times.

But on to ginger, because of course that’s where I’m obviously going.

Lots to unpack. Let’s start with the box in the photo above. It sat in my childhood home on a shelf, filled with brass rivets, I believe. It was there when my folks bought the house in 1974 and I grabbed it when I finally developed a sense of style and I needed something to photograph with my new camera. This was the first thing I photographed on 4×5 film. I did it in black-and-white and in colour, but the BW is not nearly as interesting.

I’m delaying the obvious. Ginger and I have a strange relationship. I never really gave it much thought until one day while eating a stir fry for dinner, I bit into a solid disc of ginger. Rather than grate it or chop it or do anything that would make the ginger smaller, my mom sliced it into rounds and put it into the stirfry as you would drop cordwood on a campfire.

I remember my eyes watering and my mouth being set on fire. I also remember being told that I should watch out for the ginger and that, “prizes will be awarded” – my mom’s way of reminding all of us that there might be unmarked hazards in our dinners.

I didn’t start to use ginger again until a long time after that. I avoided it like the plague. Unlike cilantro, which I grew to love tolerate, I had to unlearn the lesson I learned with ginger.

It also occurred to me many years later, that kids do really seem to have a heightened sense of taste, and that some flavours are a lot more prevalent than others in their young mouths.

Ginger snaps were the first thing I managed to enjoy again. And, of course, the gingerbread my mother made was always welcome. Candied ginger is still on the list of ‘what kind of culinary monster came up with that?’ My mother eats it like popcorn. She does seem to love the flavour.

Ginger, the root, is used regularly in our home now. peeled with a spoon and grated on the finest Microplane grater money can buy.