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Tapioca Cream

A creamy tapioca dessert made with milk, eggs, sugar, and vanilla, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Tapioca Cream

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Tapioca Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Soak the tapioca in water for 2 hours.

  2. Transfer the soaked tapioca to a double boiler with the milk.

Make the cream

  1. When it boils, beat the egg yolks until creamy and the whites until stiff.

  2. Mix a little hot milk with the egg yolks, then pour it into the boiler and stir until thick.

  3. Remove from heat, add vanilla extract, and gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

Serve

  1. Serve very cold in a glass bowl.

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Pearl tapioca
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the cream its body.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the custard, and whipped whites lighten its texture.
Rich milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca cooks in and the custard is made from.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the rich milk and eggs.

The step that matters

Stirring the yolks into the hot milk. Adding yolks straight to hot liquid can scramble them. Tempering with a little hot milk first gradually raises their temperature, so the mixture thickens smoothly.

“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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