Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Tapioca Pudding

A baked pudding of tapioca and apples, sweetened with sugar and served with maple sugar and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Apple Tapioca Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in water for 2 hours.

  2. Add 1 quart of water, butter, lemon extract, and salt to the soaked tapioca.

  3. Prepare the apples by cutting out the core and filling the hollow with sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the apples in the tapioca mixture and bake until the apples are soft.

  2. Serve with shaved maple sugar and 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Thickens the liquid into a pudding as its starch swells and gelatinizes during cooking.
Apples
Provide the fruit base that softens in the pudding and adds tartness and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them soften and brown slightly as they bake.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the pudding.

The step that matters

Bake until the apples are soft. Apples must be cooked through so they become tender, while the tapioca thickens as its starch gelatinizes. Underbaking leaves firm apples and a thin, grainy pudding, and overbaking can make the apples collapse.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, apple, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, apple, sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes