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Dessert

To Candy Ginger

A sweet preserve made by boiling ginger with sugar and water until thick and hard.

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 ↓

To Candy Ginger

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Beat 2 pounds of fine loaf sugar.

  2. In a saucepan, combine 1 pound of sugar with enough water to dissolve it and add 1 ounce of grated ginger.

  3. Stir over low heat until the mixture begins to boil.

Thicken and dry

  1. Add the remaining sugar and stir until thickened.

  2. Remove from heat and drop the mixture in cakes onto earthen dishes.

  3. Place in a warm area to dry until hard and brittle.

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

Fine loaf sugar
Forms the syrup that sets into a hard, brittle candy as it dries and cools.
Grated ginger
Adds the spicy, aromatic flavour that defines the candy.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be heated into a syrup.

The step that matters

Stir until thickened, then drop into cakes. Sugar must be cooked to a concentrated syrup before it is removed from heat. If it is undercooked, it will not set hard and brittle as it dries; if overcooked, it can turn grainy or too hard to shape.

“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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