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Dessert

Candied Ginger

Candied ginger made by boiling grated ginger with sugar and water, then forming into cakes that dry until hard.

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. Grate the ginger.

  2. Combine 1 pound of sugar with water in a pan to dissolve it.

  3. Stir over low heat until it begins to boil.

  4. Add another pound of sugar and continue stirring until thick.

Form and dry

  1. Remove from heat and drop onto earthen dishes to form cakes.

  2. Set 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

Sugar
Dissolves into a syrup that thickens and hardens as it cools and dries, giving the candy its body and sweetness.
Ginger
Supplies the spicy aroma and flavor that define the candy.

The step that matters

Add another pound of sugar and continue stirring until thick.. The syrup must reach a thick, concentrated state before it is dropped out. If it is too thin, the cakes will stay sticky instead of drying hard and brittle as they cool.

“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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