It is a quirk of the English language that to do something gingerly is to be dainty, delicate, circumspect, when ginger itself is none of these things. (In fact, the two words have no etymological kinship.) Ginger is a smack: Wake up. It has the capacity to burn, not frankly like chile but low and steady, evoking not a wanton blaze but a scouring, as focused as a laser. You feel it in the nose and in the unseen corners under your face. It clarifies.
Recipe: Honey Salabat Tea Cake
If anything, it is half medicine, half spice. (Keep in mind that in ancient times, there was little distinction drawn between the two.) Growing up in a small town on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Arlyn Osborne learned from her mother, who is from the Philippines, to rub ginger on a bruise so it might heal faster. Theirs was a chaotic household, Osborne recalls, with little time for cooking outside special occasions — everyday meals often appeared by way of the supermarket’s freezer aisle — but whenever she was feeling under the weather or worried about a test, she could count on her mother to make her salabat: a simple tea of fresh ginger root, brought to a boil and left to steep until it relinquished every drop of its restorative power.
‘This cake is powerful,’ the chef says.
Osborne eventually taught herself how to cook. Because her family couldn’t afford quality ingredients, she gravitated toward baking: Flour, butter and sugar were less expensive, and “you could make a million things out of them,” she says. After college and a halfhearted stint in insurance sales, she started filming cooking videos, then made the leap to culinary school.
In her debut cookbook, “Sugarcane: Sweet Recipes From My Half-Filipino Kitchen,” published in March, she returns to salabat, with a twist, transforming tea into tea cake. Other ingredients play central roles — lemon with its streak of sun, honey mellow and deep, sour cream delivering reliable richness — but the soul of the cake is ginger.
She begins by brewing the tea, albeit (warning!) a version much stronger than you would ever drink. The goal is to distill enough ginger to perfume and possess the cake’s every crumb. Submerge the ginger in water on the stove, and the moment it boils, drop the heat to a ripple for a good five minutes. Then let it rest twice as long, until the ginger’s life force has leached out. The water will turn amber, as if illuminated from within. It’s important when straining the ginger to press forcefully and patiently, to extract as much tea as you can. (If you don’t get half a cup’s worth, add water.)
More ginger follows: in powdered form, whisked into flour, and crystallized at the end, studding the top of the cake, after the drizzle of lemon-honey glaze has run down the sides. “This cake is powerful,” Osborne says with a laugh. It is part of her philosophy as a cook: If she promises you a flavor, there will be no timid little feints, no caution. You will taste it.
“Sugarcane” is full of exuberant recipes, including a bubble-tea tart and a variation on tres leches heady with Yakult, the Japanese fermented-dairy drink sold in minibottles — Osborne used to toss them in the freezer and eat them as Popsicles — that is an emblem of many an Asian American childhood. Sometimes her mother texts her photographs of desserts she has tried from the book, most recently marbled ube banana bread, although she didn’t have ube extract on hand and had to do without. “Mom,” Osborne remembers texting back. “Then it’s just banana bread.”
No recipe is complete in itself, of course. A cook’s touch can make all the difference. In Osborne’s childhood memory, her mother brings her salabat for a cough, and she drinks it slowly, taking in its warmth. Then her mother lays her hands gently on her daughter’s throat. She makes the tenderest of gestures, as if reaching in to grasp — what is it? sickness, anxiety, fear? — whatever it is that’s causing harm, and she plucks it out and flings it in the air.
