Name: Ginger Water Ice
Ingredients: 1 quart lemon water ice; 6 oz preserved ginger

Why it works: Lemon and ginger 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 ↓

Ginger Water Ice

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

1 quart lemon water ice
6 oz preserved ginger

Directions

Prepare

Pound half of the ginger in a mortar.
Cut the remaining ginger into small thin slices.

Make and freeze

Add the lemon water ice and mix well.
Freeze for about 1 hour.

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.

Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lemon water ice: Provides the base and the main sweet, tart citrus flavor of the dessert.
Preserved ginger: Adds spicy, aromatic ginger flavor and chewy texture throughout the ice.

“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.