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Ginger Water Ice

A chilled ginger-infused water ice made with lemon, orange, sugar, and preserved ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ginger Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil sugar and water with the yellow rinds of the lemons and orange for 5 minutes.

  2. Cool the mixture, add the juice of the lemons and orange, then freeze.

Add the ginger

  1. Pound 4 ounces of preserved ginger to a paste.

  2. Cut 2 ounces of preserved ginger into shreds.

  3. When the ice is partly frozen, add the ginger and finish freezing.

  4. Let ripen for 2 hours.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and ginger 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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the texture of the frozen ice.
Lemons
Provide acidity and bright flavor from their juice and aromatic rind oils.
Orange
Adds sweetness, acidity and citrus aroma from its rind and juice.
Preserved ginger
Provides the main spicy aroma and flavor, plus pieces that give texture.

The step that matters

Add the ginger when the ice is partly frozen. A partly frozen, slushy base holds the ginger pieces evenly. Adding them to liquid lets them sink and settle, while fully frozen ice makes them hard to mix in evenly.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Peppermintfits less well
  4. Rosemaryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, orange. 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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