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Dessert

Indian Tapioca Pudding

A sweet pudding made with milk, cornmeal, soaked tapioca, molasses, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Indian Tapioca Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix 5 large tablespoons of cornmeal with ½ pint of cold milk.

  3. Stir the cornmeal mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Add ½ cup of soaked tapioca, ½ cup of molasses, and ¼ teaspoon of salt.

  5. Stir in another ½ pint of cold milk.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until hot and serve with plenty of butter.

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. Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Molasses + buttertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,123 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding its body and a soft, grainy texture.
Tapioca
Swells when soaked and cooked, adding chewy pearls and extra thickening to the pudding.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and a deep, caramel-like flavour, and darkens the pudding as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starches hydrate and thicken into a custard-like pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornmeal mixture into the boiling milk. Cornmeal starch can clump if added to hot liquid all at once. Mixing it into cold milk first and then adding it to boiling milk while stirring keeps it smooth and lets the starch thicken evenly.

“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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