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Dessert

Tapioca Pudding Without Eggs or Milk

A sweet pudding made from soaked tapioca and apples, cooked with water and lemon peel, served with sugar and optional cream or butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and coffee work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 259 recipes. Both carry 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan, which smells thiamin, meat. The science ↓

Tapioca Pudding Without Eggs or Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in 1½ pints of water overnight.

  2. Pare and core the apples, filling the holes with white sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Grate lemon peel over the apples and pour 1¼ cups of boiling water over them.

  2. Thin the soaked tapioca to custard consistency with boiling water and pour it over the apples.

  3. Bake for 1 hour.

  4. Serve with sugar and cream or a butter and wine sauce.

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. Tea + coffeetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan (thiamin, meat).

  2. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  4. Tea + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Thickens the soaking liquid into a custard-like consistency as it cooks.
Apples
Soften during baking and provide the fruit base of the pudding.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to the apple cores and balances the tart fruit.

The step that matters

Thin the soaked tapioca to custard consistency. Tapioca thickens as it sits and cools, so the mixture must be loosened to a pourable custard before it goes over the apples. If it is too thick, the pudding will bake dense rather than moist and saucy.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, sugar, lemon, coffee. 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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