Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Ginger Sugar
Ginger Sugar
Put in a mortar one pound of powdered sugar, with two ounces of ground ginger, mix well, pass it through a sieve, bottle, cork down tightly, and it is ready for use.
A flavored sugar rather than a dish: eight parts sugar to one part ground ginger, blended fine and kept sealed. A few of the terms mean something different now.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn American kitchens of this period powdered sugar generally meant granulated sugar ground fine, with nothing added. Modern confectioners' sugar carries a small percentage of cornstarch; superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match.
- The proportionsOne pound of sugar to two ounces of ginger is a ratio of 8:1 by weight, which is assertive. If you are scaling down, 200 g sugar to 25 g ground ginger holds the same balance.
- Mortar, or notThe mortar is there to break sugar lumps and drive the ginger into the crystals rather than merely stirring the two powders together. A spice grinder or a short pulse in a food processor does the same work; a whisk alone will leave the ginger streaky.
- The sieve is the real stepGround ginger is fibrous and tends to form pellets that stirring alone may not break up. Passing the whole mix through a fine sieve is what gives an even color and keeps a clump out of a spoonful.
- Cork down tightlyCorking down guards against moisture as much as loss of aroma: sugar draws water from the air and sets into a brick. A jar with a gasket or a screw lid does the job a driven cork once did.
- How long it keepsThe sugar itself is indefinitely stable, but ground ginger loses its volatile oils within six months to a year. Make the quantity you will use in a season rather than the full pound.
- Yield and useThis makes close to three cups. Flavored sugars of this kind were generally used for dusting over fruit, cakes and puddings and for finishing hot drinks; the recipe itself specifies no use.
Spiced sugars belong to an older tradition than the hotel kitchen that produced this book: cooks are often said to have kept vanilla sugar, cinnamon sugar, rose sugar and ginger sugar in corked bottles on the shelf, so a finishing flavor was always within reach without grinding spice to order. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) includes this sort of standing-stores entry alongside the elaborate service dishes, a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen ran on prepared components as much as on set pieces. Ground ginger was a common and durable spice in an American pantry by the 1890s, imported dried and keeping far better than the fresh root, which is why it turns up in preserved-and-bottled forms like this one rather than as a fresh grating.