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Dessert

Fruit Tapioca Pudding

A baked pudding of tapioca and apples sweetened with sugar, served 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 ↓

Fruit Tapioca Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in water for 1 hour.

  2. Pare and slice or quarter the baking apples.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the apples in a baking dish and sprinkle with sugar.

  2. Pour the soaked tapioca over the apples.

  3. Bake until the tapioca is clear and the apples are soft.

  4. Let cool and serve with 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).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Apple + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,089 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Apple and sugar 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 bakes, giving the pudding its set texture.
Baking apples
Supply the fruit flavor and soften during baking to form the body of the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps draw out their juices during baking.

The step that matters

Bake until the tapioca is clear. Tapioca starch only thickens fully once it is cooked through. Pulling the dish early leaves the starch grainy and the liquid thin, so look for the translucent, clear appearance before removing it from the oven.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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