Skip to main content
Drink

Essence of Ginger

A ginger infusion made by steeping powdered ginger and lemon rind in brandy or wine spirits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Essence of Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grind whole ginger to powder just before using.

  2. Combine powdered ginger and lemon rind in a quart of brandy.

Infuse and bottle

  1. Let the mixture infuse for 14 days, shaking it daily.

  2. Strain the mixture and bottle it for use.

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 + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + brandytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Lemon + brandytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Powdered ginger
Supplies the main spicy flavour that the spirit draws out over the infusion.
Lemon rind
Adds bright citrus aroma and oils that blend into the spirit.
Brandy or spirits of wine
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour from the ginger and rind.

The step that matters

Let the mixture infuse for 14 days, shaking it daily.. Flavour is pulled out of the ginger and rind slowly by alcohol over time. Daily shaking keeps the solids in contact with the liquid, so the infusion extracts evenly rather than unevenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Apricotfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, brandy. 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.

More ginger liqueur recipes

Lemon 4 See all 12 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesGinger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger WineGinger Wine12 recipes