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Dessert

Cream Tapioca Pudding

A baked pudding made from milk, tapioca, eggs, and sugar, topped with meringue and optional jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream Tapioca Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard

  1. Seal the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Soak the tapioca in the milk for 1 hour or until transparent.

  3. Remove from heat and add the beaten egg yolks and sugar.

Bake

  1. Pour into a buttered pudding dish.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Serve with lemon sauce.

  2. Top with jam or jelly and a meringue made from the egg whites and powdered sugar.

  3. Brown the meringue in the oven.

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. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Swells in the milk and sets into a tender, pudding-like body as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca hydrates in and the custard is built on.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the custard, adding richness and a smooth texture.
Egg whites
Whipped into a meringue that gives a light, airy topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the meringue brown.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks scramble if they meet very hot liquid directly. Removing the pan from heat before adding them lets the yolks thicken the custard gently and keeps it smooth.

“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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