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Dessert

Cream-tapioca Pudding

A sweet pudding made with tapioca, milk, eggs, sugar, coconut, and topped with whipped egg whites and coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and coconut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,648 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream-tapioca Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Soak the tapioca in water overnight.

  2. Put the soaked tapioca in a quart of boiling milk and cook for 1 hour.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the yolks of 4 eggs with 1 cup of sugar, then add 3 tablespoons of coconut.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling tapioca and cook for 10 more minutes.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

Top and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth with 3 tablespoons of sugar and pour over the top.

  2. Sprinkle coconut over the entire surface.

  3. Set in the oven and brown.

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 + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding its body.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the custard, adding richness and a smooth texture.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff froth, they form a light topping that browns in the oven.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca swells and thickens in.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and the meringue-style topping.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the boiling tapioca. Adding the yolks to very hot liquid without enough stirring can scramble them. Keep stirring as the mixture cooks so the custard thickens smoothly.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Coconutthe original

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