Zedoary

Zedoary is a perennial herb of the ginger family, Zingiberaceae, native to South and Southeast Asia and now naturalised elsewhere, Florida among them. It grows in clumps up to about a metre tall, with broad, lance-shaped leaves, and its yellow flowers sit among red and green bracts. The large, branching rhizome is white inside, smells somewhat of mango and tastes like ginger with a bitter finish; it is ground into white curry pastes in Indonesia, pickled or used fresh in India, and cut raw into Thai salads. Austronesian peoples carried it across the Pacific in prehistoric times. Grieve describes the dried rhizome as an aromatic stimulant once given for colic and weak digestion, though seldom used, since ginger served as well. Kynes records that Arab physicians held it an aphrodisiac, that it reached Europe in the sixth century, that the Anglo-Saxons used it against elf enchantment, that Hildegard von Bingen called it a strong healer, and that it was taken against the plague in seventeenth-century Britain and Europe. She gives it to fire, Mars and the Sun, for healing, and suggests a sachet of the dried root hung on the bedpost to keep bad dreams away.