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Dessert

Prune and Tapioca Pudding

A pudding made from prunes and tapioca, sweetened with sugar and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Prune and Tapioca Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Soak the tapioca overnight.

  2. Boil the tapioca in just enough water to prevent burning until transparent.

Make the prune filling

  1. Stew the prunes in a quart of water until tender.

  2. Add lemon juice and sugar to the prunes.

  3. Boil the prunes until the syrup thickens.

  4. Turn the prunes into a pudding dish.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover the pudding with cooked tapioca mixed with grated lemon rind.

  2. Bake lightly in the oven.

  3. Serve without dressing or with sugar and cream.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Tapioca
Thickens the pudding and gives it a translucent, chewy texture when cooked.
Prunes
Provide the main fruit flavour and body, softening into a thick, sweet filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the prunes and balances their tartness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the prunes.

The step that matters

Boil the tapioca in just enough water until transparent. Too little water or too much heat can scorch the starch on the bottom of the pan. Tapioca is fully cooked when its granules turn clear, which shows the starch has gelatinised and will thicken properly.

“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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