[Sca-cooks] green ginger upon sirop

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

From: "Katherine Rowberd (Kirrily Robert)" <katherine at infotrope.net>
>Here's a recipe I've been wanting to try for a bit.  It's from Plat's
>"Delightes for Ladies" (1609):
>
>48. To make green ginger upon sirup.
>
>Take Ginger one pound: pare it clean: steep it in red wine and vinegar
>equally mixed: let it stand for XII daies in a close vessell, and every
>day once or twice stir it up and down: then take of wine one gallon, and
>of vinegar a pottle: seethe all together to the consumption of a moity or
>half: then take a pottle of clean clarified honey, or more, and put
>thereunto, and let them boyle well together: then take halfe an ounce
>of saffron finely beaten, and put it thereto, with some sugar if you
>please.


>I'm pondering a few things related to it, though, before I start.
>
>First off, the recipe seems to be giving us two things: a sour ginger
>pickle thing, and a sweet/sour syrup.  Presumably they're meant to be
>brought together at the end, but how?

Looks like one thing to me - first you soak the ginger, then you cook
the other stuff and mix it together - or perhaps after the 12 days
you seethe the ginger, the wine and the vinegar, then add the other
stuff as directed. Yes, it isn't quite clear from the recipe as you
quote it. The Pickled Mushrooms i made from a concatenation of
recipes from Lady Elinor Fettiplace and Sir Kenelme Digbie called for
cooking the mushrooms separately and letting them cool. And for
cooking the pickling liquid and letting it cool. Then mixing the two
cooled things together. Still for the ginger, i'd think you'd cook it
in the syrup at least part of the time... Just a guess...

>Secondly, I'm presuming that the ginger available at this time would
>have been dried.  Since whole dried ginger's hard to come by, how could
>this recipe be adapted for whole fresh ginger?

"Green" often means "fresh" as opposed to dried. So i'm assume that
some was getting to England in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries. When i made the Pickled Champignon for the Boar Hunt
Feast, one of the two recipes i used, from "Lady Elinor Fettiplace's
Receipt book" called for what seemed to me to be fresh ginger ("a
race of ginger" - if anyone knows what a race is, please let me
know), which i included rather than dried.

Anahita