Skip to main content
Dessert

Tapioca Pudding

A sweet, custard-like pudding made with tapioca, milk, eggs, sugar, brandy, cream, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Tapioca Pudding

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 ↓

Tapioca Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the base

  1. Soak the tapioca in the milk overnight.

  2. The next morning, heat the mixture in a frying kettle until it boils.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks and sugar to taste.

  4. Stir in the brandy, cream, and grated lemon peel.

Bake

  1. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  2. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and bake in a water bath at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,738 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Brandy + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Egg + brandytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Swells in the milk as it soaks and cooks, thickening the pudding and giving it a soft, gel-like body.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set during baking.
Egg whites
Folded in beaten, they add lift and a light, airy texture to the baked pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca hydrates in and the custard sets from.
Cream
Adds fat for a smoother, richer mouthfeel in the finished pudding.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Beaten whites trap air, which gives lift. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring hard deflates the foam and leaves a denser pudding.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, sugar, brandy, cream):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, brandy, 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.

More tapioca pudding recipes

Apple 146Cream 36Pineapple 22Lemon 21Peach 15Baked 14 See all 530 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesBrandy PeachesBrandy Peaches68 recipes