Ginger’s Wilder Cousin

Europe has known about ginger and its cousins cardamom and turmeric for thousands of years, but there are about dozen more spices of the ginger family in Africa and Asia. One is greater galangal (Alpinia galanga). We’ve become a little familiar with it in the last 25 years--you’ve tasted it at a Thai restaurant if you’ve ever had a soup or curry with a wild perfumed flavor, a bit like roses, cloves and fresh ginger rolled into one, with a little mustard-like sharpness.

The Thais, who are probably its greatest devotees, call it kha, and the Indonesians call it laos. The European name “galangal” comes from the Arabic khaulanja^n, which in turn probably comes from the Chinese liangjiang.

It has edible fruits, and in Southeast Asia the fragrant flower buds are often pickled or tossed into soup. But the most important part is the “root”--more exactly, it’s a rhizome or swollen underground stem--which can be used either fresh or dried, fresh being much more fragrant, just as with ginger.

Galangal entered Europe in the Middle Ages as one of the more exotic and expensive spices. In fact, it was so expensive that people took to substituting the somewhat similar fragrant root of a European cousin of the papyrus plant, Cyperus longus. If you look up “galangal” or “galingale” in older dictionaries, they’re likely to define it as cyperus.

When the medieval spice mania waned in the 18th century, galangal (both true galangal and the phony kind) ceased to play a part in European cooking. But don’t think it is utterly gone from European tables. Extract of galangal is one of the secret ingredients in Chartreuse and similar liqueurs.