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Dessert

Candied Ginger

A sweet ginger confection made by boiling grated ginger with sugar and water until thick, then drying into brittle cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and sugar 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 ↓

Candied Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a tossing pan, combine the grated ginger, 1 pound of sugar, and enough water to dissolve the sugar.

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

  3. Add the remaining 1 pound of sugar and continue stirring until thick.

Shape and dry

  1. Remove from heat and drop the mixture into cakes on earthen dishes.

  2. Set the cakes 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. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ginger and sugar 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

Granulated sugar
Forms a syrup that thickens and sets hard as it dries, giving a brittle texture.
Ginger
Supplies the pungent flavor and aroma that define the candy.

The step that matters

Continue stirring until thick. The syrup must be cooked long enough to reach a concentration that sets firm when cooled. Stopping early leaves the cakes soft and sticky, while overcooking can scorch the sugar and turn it bitter.

“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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