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Coffee Tapioca Cream

A chilled coffee dessert thickened with tapioca and eggs, served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Coffee Tapioca Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Heat the coffee in a double boiler.

  2. Add the tapioca and cook until transparent.

  3. Beat the egg yolks with sugar and salt, then dilute with some hot tapioca.

  4. Stir the yolk mixture into the double boiler and cook until thickened.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Serve

  1. Serve very 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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 coffee liquid as it cooks, giving the pudding its body and transparent pearls.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture when gently heated and add richness to the custard.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they add lightness and an airy texture to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the bitterness of the coffee.

The step that matters

Stir the yolk mixture into the double boiler and cook until thickened. Egg yolks can scramble if heated too quickly. Diluting them with hot tapioca first and cooking gently over simmering water lets them thicken 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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