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Tapioca Cream Soup

A creamy soup made with tapioca, stock, cream, onion, celery, butter, mace, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Tapioca Cream Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Wash the tapioca and soak it overnight in cold water.

Make the soup

  1. Cook the tapioca and stock together gently for 1 hour.

  2. Chop the onion and celery into small pieces and cook them with the milk and mace for 20 minutes.

  3. Strain the cooked mixture over the tapioca and stock.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, add the butter, and 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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Thickens the soup as its starch swells and gelatinizes during gentle cooking.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the soup.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca cooks and thickens in.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounded, smooth mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Cook the tapioca gently for 1 hour. Tapioca starch needs sustained heat in liquid to swell and thicken fully. Cooking too hard can scorch the bottom or break the texture, so a gentle simmer keeps the soup smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, onion, celery, butter, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, onion, celery, butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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