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Dessert

To Preserve Ginger

This recipe preserves ginger by boiling, sugaring, and storing it in syrup.

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 ↓

To Preserve Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ginger

  1. Pare the ginger with a sharp knife and place it in a pan of cold water to keep it white.

  2. Boil the ginger in water several times until tender, then drain and cool it in cold water.

Make the syrup

  1. In a bowl, combine the ginger with enough clarified sugar to cover it and let it stand for two days.

  2. Strain the syrup from the ginger and boil it with the remaining sugar for 20 to 30 minutes.

  3. Once cooled, pour the syrup over the ginger and let it stand for three to four days.

  4. If the ginger hasn't swollen sufficiently, boil the syrup again every three to four days.

Store

  1. Store in wide-mouthed bottles, cork, and seal or use bottle cement.

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

Ginger
Forms the main body of the preserve, becoming tender and absorbing the sugar syrup as it stands.
Sugar
Preserves the ginger and sweetens it, drawing moisture out and building the syrup that soaks in.

The step that matters

Boiling the ginger until tender. Ginger must be boiled several times until fully tender before it is soaked in sugar. Sugar added to firm ginger would harden the fibres and stop it softening, so the texture stays tough.

“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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