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Drink

Ginger Pop

A chilled ginger beverage made by boiling ginger, cream of tartar, sugar, toddy, lime, and water, then adding fresh toddy and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Ginger Pop

Why it works: Ginger and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,621 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ginger Pop

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape or pound the ginger.

Boil and steep

  1. Boil the ginger with cream of tartar, toddy, sugar, lime juice, and some lime rind in the water for 20 minutes.

  2. When nearly cold, add ⅓ cup of fresh toddy.

  3. Let it stand for 6 hours.

Bottle

  1. Fill into soda water bottles.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,621 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  4. Sugar + limetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + creamtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Pounded green ginger
Provides the main spicy flavour of the drink.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that gives the drink a sharp, tangy edge.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the fermentation.
Toddy
Brings the fermentation that gives the drink its fizz.
Lime
Adds acidity and aroma from the juice and rind.

The step that matters

When nearly cold, add ⅓ cup of fresh toddy. Live fermenting culture is sensitive to heat. Adding it to a hot liquid can kill it, so the mixture must be cool enough that the fresh toddy can start fermentation properly.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, cream, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, cream, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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