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Dessert

Gingerbread Squares

A sweet biscuit made with sugar, ginger, flour, butter, and treacle, baked in squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Gingerbread Squares

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Melt the butter and treacle in a jar near the fire.

  2. Mix the melted butter and treacle with the flour while warm.

  3. Spread the mixture thinly in buttered tins.

Mark, bake and separate

  1. Mark the mixture in squares before baking.

  2. Bake for 15 minutes, then separate at the marks before it hardens.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Ginger + flourtop 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 + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides the structure that holds the mixture together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, crumbly texture.
Treacle
Adds moisture, sweetness and deep colour and flavour.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the squares brown.
Ground ginger
Provides the warm, spicy aroma that defines the gingerbread.

The step that matters

Mark the squares before baking. The mixture firms up as it cools and hardens, so pieces are hard to cut cleanly afterwards. Marking the squares before baking sets the guide lines while the mixture is still soft, and separating at the marks before it hardens keeps the pieces neat.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter. 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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