Skip to main content
Dessert

Tapioca Blanc-Mange

A sweet dessert made from tapioca cooked in milk and sugar, then chilled and served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tapioca Blanc-Mange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Soak the tapioca in 2 cups of cold water for 4 hours.

Make the blanc-mange

  1. Stir the soaked tapioca into the boiling milk.

  2. Sweeten and boil slowly for 15 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Remove from heat, flavor to your liking, and pour into molds.

Chill and serve

  1. Chill and serve cold with 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. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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
Starch that thickens the milk as it cooks and sets the pudding when chilled.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and adds richness and body to the set pudding.
White sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds flavor to the milk base.

The step that matters

Boil slowly while stirring constantly. Tapioca starch can settle and scorch on the bottom of the pan. Constant stirring keeps it dispersed and evenly thickened, while gentle boiling prevents burning and lumps.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes