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Dessert

Candied Ginger

A sweet confection made by boiling sugar and water, adding grated ginger, then cooling the mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Candied Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the sugar in water until it reaches a candy stage.

  2. Grate fresh ginger into the mixture and stir well.

  3. Pour the mixture out immediately onto a surface to cool.

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

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

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

Raw sugar
Forms the syrup that crystallises around the ginger as it cools, giving the candy its sweetness and structure.
Fresh ginger
Supplies the sharp, spicy flavour that the sugar syrup carries through the finished candy.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture out immediately. Once the syrup reaches the candy stage it sets quickly as it cools, so delaying the pour can leave it hard and stuck in the pan.

“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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