Ginger, medieval spices, medieval recipes with ginger, biscotti and herbal medicine

Today I decided to try and make my ginger biscotti with freshly grated ginger. I was able to get some Hawaiian ginger from my local Fort Market and pureed it as best I could. Gerald, the owner of the market and my good friend, peeled the ginger for me and minced it, but several cooks, including his lovely wife Emerald, cautioned me to mash it further and use sparingly. Now my original recipe calls for 1 to 1-1/2 cups of crystallized ginger. So I started thinking about ginger in the Middle Ages and first turned to my old friends, Robert Lopez and Irving Raymond and Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World. I found the following on page 111 - Quilon ginger, wrinkled black ginger, peeled ginger and Malabar ginger. On page 352 they briefly discuss green ginger which should be clear and brittle and ginger in general, which should be of large roots, clean skin and not wrinkled, tender to the knife and white inside and firm and not thin and holey. Just for the record, my Hawaiian ginger (which I can pretty much bet wasn't on the medieval market) was yellow inside. On the medicinal side, my Medieval Kitchen by Odile Redon states that the French were inordinately fond of the ginger/cinnamon combo (who isn't? and I'm not even French!) and that most ingredients we would call spices in the modern world were considered to have warm and dry properties, except for ginger and saffron (loved by the Italians) which were warm and moist. Very important when you're prescribing to keep the humors in balance. And just in case you're interested, aside from ginger, there are mulberry granita, jasmine ice, almond granita, cinnamon granita, lemon granita, and gelato of any and all flavors. What does a mulberry taste like?