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Ginger with Cream
Preserved ginger Whipped cream Cut up some ginger about the size of peas, and put a teaspoon and a very little syrup in each paper ramequin case. Fill the cases with whipped cream, and serve.
Three ingredients and no cooking, so the whole dish rests on the quality of the ginger and the restraint of the cream. Buy stem ginger in syrup rather than crystallised.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars and often labelled Chinese or Canton ginger. Crystallised or candied ginger is dry-sugared and will not give you the syrup the recipe asks for; if it is all you can find, the dish loses its point.
- Paper ramequin casesSmall paper cups for individual servings, of the same family as the paper cupcake liner. Modern paper souffle cups of about 2 fl oz, or small glasses or espresso cups, do the same job and hold their shape better under cream.
- How much syrup"A very little" is left undefined in the recipe; a few drops, up to perhaps a quarter teaspoon, suits the instruction. The syrup is intensely sweet, and more will sweeten the cream and can slacken it.
- The creamWhip heavy or double cream to soft peaks only, and leave it unsweetened. The ginger and its syrup carry all the sugar the dish needs, and over-whipped cream will look grainy against the smooth ginger.
- Cutting the gingerPea-sized dice, as written, matters more than it sounds. Larger pieces sink and give one mouthful all the heat while the rest tastes of nothing.
- Yield and timingA cup of cream, whipped, fills roughly six to eight small cases; at a teaspoon of ginger each, a jar of stem ginger goes a long way further. Assemble shortly before serving and keep chilled; the cream slackens once the syrup is in contact with it.
Preserved ginger in syrup reached British and American kitchens as an import, most of it shipped from Canton in squat glazed stoneware jars that were themselves kept and reused long after the ginger was gone. By the late nineteenth century the jars were a familiar sight in grocers' windows, and cookbooks put the contents to use as a ready-made dessert component: chopped into ice cream, folded into cream, spooned over junket. A cold sweet that requires no stove, no eggs and no gelatine was exactly the sort of thing that filled out a menu.