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Dessert

Ginger Cakes, Without Butter

A ginger cake made with flour, sugar, ginger, candied orange peel, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,833 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Ginger Cakes, Without Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ginger

  1. Pound the ginger very fine in a mortar.

  2. Heat the water in a pan, then sift the ginger into it and boil for a few minutes.

  3. Remove the pan from heat and let the ginger-water cool.

Make the paste

  1. Sift flour onto a clean surface.

  2. Pound the orange peel and pass it through a sieve.

  3. Add the pounded peel, ginger, and ginger-water to the flour and mix into a paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the paste to the thickness of a penny and cut into cakes with a round cutter.

  2. Prick the cakes well before placing them in the oven.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the paste that holds the cakes together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown as they bake.
Ginger
Provides the main spicy flavour and aroma.
Candied orange peel
Adds citrus aroma and a bright, slightly bitter flavour.

The step that matters

Prick the cakes well before baking. Pricking lets steam escape from the dough as it heats, so the cakes stay flat rather than puffing or blistering unevenly in the oven.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, ginger):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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