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Dessert

Ginger Tablet

A hard candy made from sugar, water, and finely ground ginger.

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 Tablet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a brass or copper pan, combine the sugar and cold water.

  2. Stir until it boils, then boil until it reaches 'candy high'.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the ground ginger until it thickens.

Set and cut

  1. Prepare a greased sheet of paper on a stone slab and place four iron rods to form a square.

  2. Pour the mixture into the square and let it set.

  3. Once set, turn it over, remove the paper, and cut into small squares.

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

Coarse sugar
Provides the bulk of the sweetness and forms the firm, set body of the tablet as it cools.
Ground ginger
Adds the characteristic spicy aroma and flavour to the sugar mass.

The step that matters

Boiling to 'candy high'. Sugar must reach the right concentration before setting. Too little boiling leaves the tablet soft and sticky, while overboiling makes it hard and brittle. Stirring in the ginger off the heat helps keep the mixture from crystallising too early.

“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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