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Dessert

Ginger Creams

A sweet ginger confection made by boiling sugar and water, adding ginger, and setting in a buttered dish.

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 ↓

Ginger Creams

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil sugar and water for 10 to 20 minutes until a drop forms a soft ball in cold water.

  2. Add ginger and beat the mixture over a basin of cold water until it thickens.

  3. Pour into a buttered dish and cut into pieces when cold.

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

Sugar
Forms the sweet body of the creams and sets firm as the syrup cools.
Ginger
Provides the aroma and sharp spiciness that flavours the creams.

The step that matters

Beating the syrup until it thickens. Beating a hot sugar syrup while it cools causes fine sugar crystals to form, giving a smooth, creamy texture rather than a hard or grainy one. Cooling over cold water controls how quickly it thickens, so it sets before it hardens.

“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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