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GINGER, PRESERVED, IMITATION OF (another way)
Take medium-sized vegetable-marrows; remove the peel and seeds, and cut the marrow into small lumps about two inches long. Weigh them, and pour over them as much syrup as will cover them; the syrup being made by pouring one pint of boiling water over half a pound of moist sugar. Cover the bowl which contains the vegetable-marrows, to keep out the dust, and put it on one side for two days. At the end of that time, drain the pieces of marrow, and lay them in a saucepan, with one pound of loaf sugar and a cupful of water to every pound of marrow. Put into a muslin bag two ounces of freshly-ground ginger and half a tea-spoonful of cayenne, and allow this quantity, with the rind and juice of three lemons, to every four pounds of marrow. Simmer gently, and, when clear, add a glass of gin. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient, one pound of marrow will make about one pound of preserve.
A Victorian thrift preserve that turns a glut of marrow into something resembling the Cantonese stem ginger sold in stoneware jars. The technique is sound; the vocabulary needs translating.
- Vegetable marrowA marrow is an overgrown summer squash — a courgette left to reach 10-14 inches. Large zucchini or a young pale-skinned squash will do; you want firm flesh, so discard the spongy seed cavity generously rather than sparingly.
- Moist sugar and loaf sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined or barely refined soft brown sugar. "Loaf sugar" was hard refined white sugar broken from a cone — ordinary granulated is the modern equivalent, weight for weight.
- The first steeping is the pointThe two days in weak syrup draw water out of the marrow and firm it. Skip or shorten it and the pieces collapse in the second boiling instead of turning translucent. Cover and leave at cool room temperature, or refrigerate if your kitchen is warm.
- Freshly-ground gingerThis means dried ginger root ground at home, not fresh rhizome. Two ounces (about 55 g) of ground dried ginger to four pounds of marrow is a fierce dose and is what carries the imitation; bruised fresh ginger will not substitute at the same weight.
- A glass of ginThe recipe says only "a glass"; a wineglassful in period cookery is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so that is the likely order of quantity. The original does not say whether the pan comes off the heat first, but adding the spirit off the boil will preserve more of the gin and its juniper.
- "When clear"The visual cue matters more than any clock, and the original gives no time. Simmer gently until the lumps go from opaque white to translucent amber. A rolling boil risks crystallising the syrup and toughening the flesh.
- CayenneHalf a teaspoon to four pounds is not for heat but for the back-of-the-throat burn that real preserved ginger has. It is easy to overshoot; measure it.
- Keeping itThe original gives no sealing or storage instruction. Pot it hot into clean jars and keep it in the refrigerator, or follow a current tested water-bath process if you want it shelf-stable — the sugar concentration here has not been measured against modern preserving standards.
- YieldRoughly a pound of preserve per pound of prepared marrow, as stated. Four pounds of marrow fills about five or six half-pint jars.
Preserved ginger — young rhizome boiled in syrup and shipped from Canton in glazed stoneware jars — was a luxury import on British tables through the nineteenth century. Cassell's offers this and at least one other "imitation" because vegetable marrow was the opposite: a crop that gardeners could not give away by late summer, bland, watery and endlessly abundant. The trick of using it as a carrier for expensive flavourings runs right through Victorian domestic cookery, where marrow is often said to have stood in for apricot and pineapple in jams. The cost note of eightpence a pound is there for the same reason the book gives costs everywhere.