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Dessert

Ginger Oread

A ginger-flavored cake made with butter or beef dripping, flour, sugar, ginger, spices, and treacle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Ginger Oread

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Rub the butter or beef dripping into the flour.

  3. Mix in the moist sugar, ground ginger, and mixed spices.

  4. Stir until well combined, then mix in the treacle to form a stiff paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the paste and cut it into rounds.

  2. Place the rounds on a floured baking tin and bake for about 30 minutes.

  3. Once cooled, store the cakes in a dry place.

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 + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Ginger + macetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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 stiff paste together as it bakes.
Butter or beef dripping
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, giving a short, tender crumb.
Treacle
Adds moisture, sweetness and deep flavour, and helps bind the paste.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture while helping the cakes brown in the oven.
Ground ginger
Supplies the warm, spicy aroma that defines the cake.

The step that matters

Stirring in the treacle to a stiff paste. Treacle is sticky and heavy, so it must be fully combined into the dry mixture. Unevenly mixed treacle leaves streaks and dry pockets, and an overworked or too-wet paste can bake dense and tough rather than tender.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

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