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Dessert

Tapioca Meringue

A dessert made from soaked tapioca, milk, eggs, and sweetener, folded with whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tapioca Meringue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Soak the tapioca in the milk for 2 hours or more.

  2. Cook the soaked tapioca in a double boiler until soft.

  3. Beat the yolks of the eggs and stir them into the tapioca mixture.

  4. Sweeten and flavor the mixture.

  5. Set aside to cool.

Finish with meringue

  1. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks.

  2. Fold the whipped egg whites into the cooled mixture.

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

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

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

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Swells in the milk and thickens the mixture as it cooks until soft.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca softens and thickens in.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and thicken the custard; whites whipped to stiff peaks lighten the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and adds body to the custard.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Whipped whites hold air, and deflating them by stirring rather than folding loses the lightness meringue provides. Fold gently, and only once the mixture has cooled so the heat does not collapse the foam.

“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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