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Dessert

Green Ginger Preserve

A preserve made by boiling green ginger with water, reducing to a cup, then adding sugar-candy until tender.

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 ↓

Green Ginger Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ginger

  1. Scrape and clean the green ginger well.

  2. In a pot, combine the ginger and water.

Cook the preserve

  1. Boil it down to 1 cup or less, skimming carefully while boiling.

  2. Strain the liquid and return it to the pot.

  3. Add the sugar-candy and boil the ginger in the mixture until tender.

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

Green ginger
Provides the main flavour and aroma, and becomes tender as it simmers in the syrup.
Sugar-candy
Adds sweetness and thickens the liquid into a preserve as it boils.

The step that matters

Boil down to 1 cup and skim carefully. Reducing the liquid concentrates the flavour, and skimming removes foam and impurities that would make the preserve cloudy or off-tasting.

“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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