Skip to main content
Dessert

Ginger Syrup

A preserved ginger syrup with fruit, sugar, brandy, and lemon, steeped and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and lemon 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 Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ginger water

  1. Boil the ginger pieces in a large quantity of water until the water tastes strongly of ginger.

  2. Add the solid fruit to the ginger water and boil until nearly tender.

  3. Transfer the fruit to a jar with the ginger water and let it sit for 4 to 5 days, stirring constantly.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine the sugar, brandy, lemon peel, lemon juice, and a little ginger water in a pot to make the syrup.

  2. Boil the syrup, removing any scum.

  3. Add the fruit to the syrup and boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Remove the mixture from heat.

  5. Let it sit for a week.

  6. Drain the syrup and boil it with additional sugar until it becomes rich.

  7. Add the fruit back in and boil for another 10 to 15 minutes.

Store

  1. Store the fruit in pots covered with brandy paper; they will be ready to use in a month.

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 + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Ginger + brandytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

White ginger
Gives the water and syrup their strong ginger flavour.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, once boiled down, thickens it into a rich texture.
Brandy
Adds alcohol that carries flavour and helps preserve the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet syrup.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic citrus oils to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup with scum removal. Skimming scum as the syrup boils keeps it clear and clean-tasting. Boiling the syrup with extra sugar until rich concentrates it, so it thickens as it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Apricotfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar, brandy. 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.

More ginger syrup recipes

Apple 6 See all 22 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes