"Every bottle of Clicquot Club Ginger Ale is generous measure - not the skimpy bottle you are accustomed to in buying ordinary ginger ales. We believe not only in giving honest goods, but in giving honest measure. There are two generous glassfuls in every bottle - enough for two persons, or two drinks for one person. Clicquot Club Ginger Ale is made of the purest confectioners' sugar, Jamaica ginger and citric fruit flavors the earth affords - and the purest and best water. Fresh, country air sweeps through the factory, and the blending and carbonating (done under the supervision of an expert chemist) is in surroundings as clean as a model housewife's kitchen. Clicquot Club is the kind of ginger ale you would make for yourself if you had our facilities". This piece of text is taken from a newspaper advertisement published in 1911, one of a range of adverts placed by Clicquot Club across North America. I was taken not only by its quaintness but also by its complete lack of dubious and unsubstantiated claims used by advertisers until relatively recently.
The Clicquot Club Company was founded in 1881 by Henry Millis in Millis, Massachusetts. The company initially sold sparkling cider but after a few years began to focus on ginger ale which remained popular for the next 70 or so years. The steadily increasing sales of Clicquot Club Ginger Ale, made from Jamaican ginger, coincided with a sharp increase in ginger exports from Jamaica. In fact, by the 1960s, Jamaica was the third largest producer of ginger in the world after India and Sierra Leone. In 1965 Canada Dry acquired Clicquot and closed it down. It was about this time that the Jamaican ginger industry started its rapid decline from which it is still trying to recover. Were these two events linked? Was the success of Jamaican ginger a direct result of the success of Clicquot? I think that it was more than just a coincidence.
There was good news last week for ginger growers in the Indian state of Mizoram. The state government has amended its liquor prohibition law to allow growers to convert their ginger crops into wine. The change also applies to grapes, apples, passion fruit, peaches and pears. The government has acknowledged that farmers can actually earn more from converting raw crops into wine. Presumably the government will also take more in taxation.
This week's "ginger in medicine" research project is an Egyptian study entitled Role of Ginger Against the Reproductive Toxicity of Aluminium Chloride in Albino Male Rats. The study involved feeding two groups of rats aluminium chloride (AlCl3) with one of these groups also receiving a daily dose of ginger. The outcome was that the ginger feed had an ameliorating effect on the AlCl3 toxicity. I don't know much about aluminium chloride but I do know that in one form it is irritating to the skin and in another form it is used in deodorants and antiperspirants. I have also discovered a report of another Egyptian study last year but that one used grape seed extract instead of ginger. Do the Egyptians have a particular problem with aluminium chloride?
I was quite pleased yesterday when my wife discovered a rhubarb and ginger cheese. I haven't tried it yet but when I do I will publish a review on www.allthingsginger.co.uk.
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