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Dessert

Candied Ginger

Candied ginger is ginger coated in sugar and dried to a hard, brittle candy.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

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

  2. Heat over a very slow fire until the sugar begins to boil.

Cook and shape

  1. Stir in another pound of sugar and continue stirring until thick.

  2. Remove from heat and drop into cakes on earthen dishes.

Dry

  1. Set in a warm place to dry until white, 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

Ginger
Provides the main flavor and aroma of the candy.
Powdered lump sugar
Sweetens the candy and, as it cools, sets into a hard, brittle crust.

The step that matters

Stirring until thick. Sugar must be cooked and stirred until it thickens and crystallizes; if it is removed too early it stays soft and sticky, and if overcooked it can burn or set too hard to shape into cakes.

“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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