Home › Some Less Known Fruits › Preserved Ginger
Preserved Ginger
Scrape the young, green roots and weigh them, allowing equal weight of sugar. Boil each separately, the ginger until tender enough to be pierced with a wooden splinter, and the sugar with water and cream of tartar until it forms a syrup. (Allow a half pint of water and a half teaspoon of cream of tartar to each pound of sugar.) Skim the syrup well; place the ginger in it and when it has boiled up well place in jars and seal.
This may be varied in flavour by adding lemon, orange, or other fruit as flavouring. To every three pounds of ginger allow at least the juice of one lemon and rind, and for each pint additional of lemon juice add one pound of sugar.
A straightforward sugar preserve, but it stands or falls on the age of the ginger. Everything else is arithmetic.
- Young ginger is the whole recipe"Young, green roots" means fresh spring or stem ginger with thin, pale skin and pink tips, not the tan, papery-skinned mature rhizome sold year-round. Mature ginger stays fibrous however long it is boiled, and the pieces tend to remain stringy in the syrup.
- ScrapingThe skin on young ginger comes away under the edge of a teaspoon; a peeler removes too much flesh. Cut the scraped rhizome into finger-thick pieces or coins before boiling so the syrup penetrates evenly.
- Half a pint of waterAn American half pint is one cup (240 ml) per pound of sugar. If you are working from a British text of the same period the half pint is 10 fl oz, but for a syrup that is boiled down the difference is not critical.
- Cream of tartarIt is there to invert part of the sugar so the syrup does not crystallise in the jar. Half a teaspoon per pound is what the recipe specifies; much more inverts too much sugar and the preserve stays slack.
- Boiling the gingerSimmer in plain water, changing it once if you want the heat tamed. Young ginger takes roughly 30-45 minutes to reach the point where a wooden skewer goes through without resistance. Drain it before it goes into the syrup or you will thin the syrup.
- "Boiled up well"One good boil is enough to set the ginger and the syrup together. Long boiling darkens the syrup and toughens the pieces. If the syrup seems thin, lift out the ginger, reduce the syrup alone, then return the ginger.
- The lemon arithmeticThe rule reads: juice and rind of one lemon minimum per 3 lb of ginger, and if you push the lemon juice up beyond that, add a further pound of sugar for each additional pint of juice. At household scale a pint of lemon juice is far more than the first clause implies, so the second clause reads as a scaling note rather than an instruction.
- Sealing and storageFilling jars hot and sealing was ordinary practice when this was written, but it is not a tested preserving process, and ginger on its own is low-acid. Follow current guidance for a boiling-water bath, or simply keep the finished jars in the refrigerator and use them within a few months.
- Yield and useA pound of scraped ginger with its pound of sugar will fill two or three half-pint jars, depending on how far the syrup is reduced. Serve the pieces with cheese or cold rice pudding, chop them into cake and steamed puddings, and keep the syrup for glazing ham or sweetening tea.
Ginger preserved in heavy syrup was long familiar in the West as an import before it was made at home: through the nineteenth century, decorated stoneware jars of "Canton ginger" came from southern China, and the jars themselves were often prized and reused once emptied. That trade helps explain why a recipe like this appears in an English-language fruit book at all, and why it sits under "Some Less Known Fruits" rather than among the jams -- ginger is a rhizome, not a fruit or a root, but it was handled exactly as one handled quinces or green walnuts, boiled tender then candied in syrup. The instruction to use young green ginger points to a cook with access to the fresh rhizome rather than the dried, ground spice more usually kept in households of the period, which makes this something closer to an aspirational recipe: a way of producing at home the confection ordinarily bought by the jar.