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Dessert

Ginger Preserves

A preserve made by boiling ginger in a sugar syrup and allowing it to steep.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Ginger Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ginger

  1. Pare the ginger roots and soak them in cold water for 15 minutes.

  2. Boil the ginger in three changes of water until very tender.

  3. Drain the ginger and place it in ice water.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 1¼ pounds of sugar and 1 cup of water for each pound of sugar to make the syrup.

  2. Boil the syrup and skim until the scum stops rising.

  3. Let the syrup cool.

Steep and preserve

  1. Dry the ginger and add it to the syrup.

  2. Let the mixture sit for 24 hours.

  3. Drain the ginger and reheat the syrup until boiling.

  4. Add the ginger back into the syrup and let it sit for 2 days.

  5. Reboil the syrup.

  6. Pour the hot syrup over the ginger.

  7. Cover the preserves closely.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Roots of green ginger
Provides the main flavor and the firm, fibrous texture of the preserves.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserves and, at high concentration, helps preserve the ginger.

The step that matters

Boil the ginger in three changes of water until very tender.. Ginger root is tough and fibrous, and boiling it in fresh water several times softens it and mellows its sharpness. Stopping early leaves the pieces hard and biting.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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