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Dessert

Apple Tapioca

A baked apple dish with tapioca, salt, lemon, sugar, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Tapioca

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tapioca

  1. Cook tapioca in boiling water until transparent.

  2. Add salt, lemon rind, and sugar to the tapioca.

Prepare and bake

  1. Core, peel, and cut apples into 1/2 inch pieces.

  2. Arrange apples in a baking dish and pour lemon juice over them.

  3. Add the tapioca mixture on top of the apples.

  4. Bake until apples are tender.

  5. Add butter before removing from 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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 liquid into a soft, clear, pudding-like layer as it cooks.
Apples
Provide the fruit base that softens during baking and gives the dish its body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the apples and lemon.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded flavor to the finished dish.

The step that matters

Cook tapioca in boiling water until transparent. Tapioca starch must be fully cooked to swell and turn clear; undercooked pearls stay opaque and chewy, leaving a grainy texture in the finished dish.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, butter):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, butter. 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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