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Dessert

Cherry Tapioca

A sweet dessert made with tapioca, cherries, and sugar, served cold with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Cherry Tapioca

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in water overnight.

Make the pudding

  1. Add the cherry juice to the soaked tapioca and mix in enough sugar to make it sweet.

  2. Cook in a double boiler until very soft.

  3. Add the cherries and cook until the fruit is soft, adding more water if necessary.

Serve

  1. Serve cold with whipped or plain 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells and softens during cooking, giving the pudding its body.
Cherries
Provide the main fruit flavor, tartness, and color, and soften into the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the cherries and juice.

The step that matters

Cook the tapioca until very soft. Tapioca pearls need sustained, gentle heat to fully swell and turn translucent. If they are undercooked, they stay firm and chalky, and the pudding will not set into a smooth texture.

“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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