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Dessert

To Candy Ginger

A sweet confection of ginger coated in sugar.

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 pan, combine 1 pound of sugar with enough water to dissolve it and 1 ounce of grated raw ginger.

  3. Stir over a very slow fire until the sugar begins to boil.

Thicken the mixture

  1. Stir in the remaining pound of sugar and keep stirring until thick.

  2. Remove from heat and drop in cakes on earthen dishes.

Dry the candy

  1. Set in a warm place 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
Dissolves into a syrup that thickens and sets hard and brittle as it cools and dries.
Raw ginger
Adds its sharp, warm flavour and aroma to the candy.

The step that matters

Stir until thick before dropping. As water evaporates, the sugar concentration rises and the syrup thickens. If it is removed too early, the cakes stay soft and sticky. Cooking too long can make the mixture grainy and hard to shape, so watch for the thickening rather than a set time.

“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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