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Drink

Mock Ginger

A drink made by boiling lettuce stalks with sugar and ginger, then simmering in a ginger syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and ginger work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 274 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Mock Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Cut off the stalks of lettuce going to seed and remove the strings.

  2. Cut them into 2-3 inch pieces and soak in water.

Make the ginger syrup

  1. Mix sugar and water in a pot, then add pounded ginger.

  2. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes, then let it sit for 2 days.

  3. Boil again for 30 minutes, repeating this process 5-6 times.

  4. Drain the stalks on a sieve and wipe them dry.

  5. Prepare a thick syrup with whole ginger and pour it over the hot stalks.

  6. Boil the stalks in the syrup 2-3 times until they look clear and taste like West Indian gingers.

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. Lettuce + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together274 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  3. Lettuce + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,486 recipes

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

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

Lettuce stalks
Provide the bulk of the candied product, which takes on the syrup and becomes firm and translucent.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and, as it concentrates in the syrup, preserves the stalks.
Pounded ginger
Supplies the characteristic spicy aroma and flavour that the stalks absorb.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling and resting in the syrup. Sugar must slowly penetrate the stalks over several cycles; boiling too hard or too briefly can leave them tough, cloudy, or under-flavoured instead of clear and candied.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. 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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