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Dessert

Apple Tapioca

A sweet dish of cooked tapioca mixed with apples, baked until soft.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Apple Tapioca

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. If using pearl tapioca, soak it in cold water overnight or for several hours. Minute tapioca does not need soaking.

Cook the tapioca

  1. Pour boiling water over the tapioca and cook in a double boiler until transparent, stirring often and adding salt.

Bake and serve

  1. Pare and slice the apples, place them in a baking dish, and sprinkle with sugar and lemon juice if desired.

  2. Pour the cooked tapioca over the apples and bake until the apples are very soft.

  3. Serve hot or cold.

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 + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 liquid as it cooks, giving the pudding its body and translucent, gel-like texture.
Apples
Provide the fruit flavour and soften during baking, becoming tender beneath the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the apples.

The step that matters

Cooking the tapioca until transparent. Tapioca starch thickens only when fully cooked with enough hot liquid. Stopping early leaves a starchy, cloudy, or grainy texture, and pearl tapioca needs its overnight soak so it cooks 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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