Name: Indian Tapioca Pudding
Ingredients: 1 pint milk; 5 large tablespoons cornmeal; ½ pint cold milk; ½ cup tapioca, soaked; ¼ cup molasses; ¼ teaspoon salt; ½ pint cold milk; butter, for serving

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

Boil 1 pint of milk.
Stir in 5 large tablespoons of cornmeal that has been mixed with ½ pint of cold milk.
Add ½ cup of soaked tapioca and ¼ cup of molasses, along with ¼ teaspoon of salt.
Stir in ½ pint more of cold milk.
Bake.

Serve

Serve hot 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.

Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,243 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
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.
Tapioca: Soaked tapioca softens and adds a chewy, slightly jelly-like texture.
Molasses: Adds sweetness and a deep, caramel-like flavour.
Milk: Forms the liquid base that the starches thicken and bake into a custard.

“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.