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Drink

Mock Ginger

A ginger-flavored beverage made from lettuce stalks, sugar, water, and ginger.

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 peel off the strings.

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

Make the ginger syrup

  1. Mix 1 pound of sugar with 5 pints of water and add 2 tablespoons of pounded ginger.

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

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

Finish the stalks

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

  2. Prepare a thick syrup made strong with whole ginger and pour it over the hot stalks.

  3. 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 main bulk, which becomes firm and translucent after repeated boiling in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, once concentrated, helps preserve the stalks and give them a glossy coating.
Ginger
Supplies the spicy aroma and flavour that makes the stalks taste like ginger.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling in the syrup. Each boil concentrates the sugar and draws it into the stalks, so the pieces turn clear and firm. Stopping early leaves them opaque and wet, so the boiling should be repeated until they look clear.

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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