au777 A Rich, Gingery Tea Cake With Restorative Powers
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It is a quirk of the English language that to do something gingerly is to be daintyau777, 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 CakeIf 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.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT‘This cake is powerful,’ the chef says.Follow The New York TimesFind us on Instagram for the best of our visual journalism and beyond.Join our WhatsApp Channel for breaking news, games, recipes and more.Connect with us on Facebook to get the best of The Times, right in your feed.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 videosau777, then made the leap to culinary school.