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Dessert

Ginger Drops

A candied orange and ginger candy made by boiling sugar and water, then dropping onto paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,833 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Ginger Drops

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a mortar, beat the candied orange with a little sugar to form a paste.

  2. Mix the powdered ginger with the loaf sugar.

  3. Wet the sugar with a little water and boil the mixture to a candy.

  4. Drop the candy onto paper in the size of mint drops.

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. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Candied orange
Adds bright citrus aroma and sweetness, and its sugar helps the paste hold together.
Powdered white ginger
Provides the main spicy aroma and warm flavour throughout the candy.
Loaf sugar
Forms the body of the candy; when boiled, it sets into a hard, glassy mass.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to a candy. Sugar must reach a high enough concentration to set hard when cool. If boiled too little, the drops stay soft and sticky; if boiled too long, the sugar darkens and tastes bitter.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Lemonfits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Vanillafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar. 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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