It was a shining autumn day as Zhu Yinfeng, private chef to Hangzhou restaurateur Dai Jianjun, and I walked out into the fields of an organic farm in southern Zhejiang province. A few puffs of white clouds floated in an azure sky. Birds trilled against a background hum of insects. We walked among the neat rows of vegetables, Zhu pulling up a few loose heads of bok choy and laying them in his basket.
And then, in the shade of a row of peach trees, there was a patch of plants with dramatic clusters of spear-like leaves, vivid as a Rousseau painting. Zhu crouched and dug, and soon he had plucked out of the earth a whole bunch of ginger rhizomes, their pale golden yellow tinged with rosy pink, each one thrusting upwards with spiky horns of tight-furled leaves. It was the first ginger I’d ever seen in the field and shockingly beautiful.
In southern China, ginger is a core ingredient in daily meals. In Europe, its warm, peppery aroma is one of the scents of winter, of gingerbread and biscuits, hot ginger tea for coughs and colds, candied ginger on the Christmas table and gingerbread houses jewelled with sweets.