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Dessert

Cream Tapioca Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with milk, sugar, tapioca, and egg yolks, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Make the pudding

  1. Scald the milk in a double boiler.

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

  3. Remove from the stove and add the beaten yolks and sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a buttered pudding dish for 30 minutes.

  2. Serve.

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. Sugar + eggtop 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

Milk
Liquid that the tapioca absorbs and swells in, giving the pudding its body.
Tapioca
Starch that swells in the milk and thickens the pudding as it sets.
Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard and add richness and a smooth texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild, creamy flavour of the milk.

The step that matters

Add the yolks off the heat. Egg yolks scramble and turn grainy when they meet very hot milk. Removing the pan from the stove first lets them thicken the pudding gently and smoothly.

“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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