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Dessert

Boiled Tapioca Pudding

A sweet pudding made from boiled tapioca, milk, butter or cream, sugar, ratafia cakes, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Tapioca Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding base

  1. Boil the tapioca in the milk for 2 hours.

  2. Add the butter or cream, sugar, and ratafia cakes.

  3. Beat well for 10 minutes.

  4. Stir in the beaten eggs briskly.

Steam and serve

  1. Butter a mold.

  2. Pour in the pudding mixture.

  3. Cover with buttered writing paper.

  4. Steam over fast-boiling water for 1½ hours.

  5. Carefully turn out and serve with fruit sauce.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. 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
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding its body and soft set.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca swells in and cooks into a custard-like texture.
Butter or cream
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender mouthfeel.
Eggs
Set during steaming to firm the pudding and add structure and richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps balance the flavour.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten eggs briskly. Adding eggs to a hot mixture can scramble them into lumps if they are not stirred in quickly and evenly. Brisk stirring disperses the egg through the mixture so it sets smooth during steaming.

“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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