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Dessert

Candied Ginger

A preserve of grated ginger sweetened with powdered sugar and water, dried into hard brittle cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Combine grated ginger, 1 pound powdered sugar, and enough water to dissolve the sugar in a preserving pan.

  2. Stir over very low heat until the sugar begins to boil.

  3. Add the additional pound of powdered sugar and continue stirring until the mixture thickens.

Shape and dry

  1. Remove from heat and drop the mixture in cakes onto earthen dishes.

  2. Place in a warm area 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

Grated ginger
Provides the main flavor and aroma of the candy.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the candy and, as it thickens, forms the firm sugary mass that sets when dried.

The step that matters

Stirring until the mixture thickens. Sugar syrup must be cooked far enough to thicken as it cools, otherwise the cakes will not set. Cooking too long or too hot can make the sugar crystallize or scorch, so stirring over very low heat keeps the syrup smooth.

“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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