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Ginger, Preserved, Imitation Of
Use either garden rhubarb or the stalks of lettuce, going to seed. Strip of the stringy part, and cut the stalks into pieces about two inches long. Wash them well, drain, and put them into a saucepan with five pints of water, one pound of sugar, and two table-spoonfuls of freshly-ground ginger. Boil slowly for twenty minutes, and set the preparation aside for two days, boil then half an hour, and repeat the process a third time. Drain the stalks. Make a thick syrup by boiling together one cupful of water, one pound of loaf sugar, and one ounce and a half of ginger for every pound of stalks. Pour the syrup boiling hot upon the stalks, and, when cold, put the preserve into jars, and cover closely. It will be ready for use in a fortnight. Probable cost, 7d. per pound.
A Victorian mock preserve that leans on ginger and sugar to make rhubarb or bolted lettuce stems pass for the imported Chinese sweetmeat. The repeated boil-and-rest cycles are the whole method: they drive syrup into the stalks without collapsing them.
- Rhubarb leaves are toxicUse the stalks only, and cut away every trace of leaf, including the crimson leaf base. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and related compounds and are not edible in any quantity.
- Bolted lettuce stemsThe alternative here is the thick flowering stem of lettuce that has run to seed, peeled of its tough outer skin. It is bitter and milky with latex when raw; the three boilings are what make it palatable. Blanching and discarding the first water helps.
- Imperial pintsFive imperial pints is 100 imperial fl oz, about 12 US cups or 2.8 litres. That is a generous bath for the stalks, and some of it will boil away over the three cookings.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight.
- Freshly-ground gingerThis most likely means dried ginger root ground at home rather than fresh rhizome. Two tablespoons of ground dried ginger in the cooking liquor, then an ounce and a half (about 40 g, roughly 7-8 tablespoons) per pound of stalks in the finishing syrup, is a very heavy hand by modern taste. Half that quantity still reads clearly as ginger.
- The two-day restsThe pauses let the sugar equalise through the stalk instead of shrivelling it. Keep the pan covered and refrigerated between boilings rather than standing at room temperature for forty-eight hours, which is where a sugar syrup starts to ferment.
- StorageThis is not a tested canning recipe, and the lettuce-stalk version in particular is a low-acid vegetable in syrup. Treat the finished preserve as a refrigerator preserve, in clean covered jars, and eat it within a few weeks; do not seal it for shelf storage. The fortnight of waiting is for flavour, not for safety.
- Yield and useUse -- Serve it as the real article was served: chopped into cakes and steamed puddings, with cheese, or spooned with its syrup over cream.
- The cost noteSevenpence a pound is pre-decimal currency, from a book of the 1870s-80s. Imported preserved ginger was a costlier article, which is the point of the imitation.
Preserved ginger reached Britain in stoneware jars from Canton, packed in heavy syrup, and it was expensive enough that a household book like Cassell's could reasonably assume readers wanted a substitute. Imitation preserves of this kind were a standing feature of nineteenth-century cookery: mock turtle from a calf's head, mock cream from cornflour, and here mock ginger from garden rhubarb or the seed stalk of lettuce that would otherwise have been pulled up and thrown on the heap. The trick works because what people identified as "preserved ginger" was largely texture and syrup, and rhubarb boiled repeatedly in sugar gives a translucent, slightly fibrous chew close enough to pass. The lettuce version is the more telling detail, since it belongs to a garden economy in which a bolted crop was a problem to be solved rather than compost.