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Dessert

Tapioca Jelly

A sweet, lemon-flavored gelatin made from soaked tapioca, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tapioca Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in 1 pint of cold water until soft.

Cook

  1. In a saucepan, combine the soaked tapioca, sugar, lemon rind, lemon juice, salt, and 1 pint of water.

  2. Stir the mixture until it boils.

Set and serve

  1. Pour it into a mold and let it cool for 5 to 6 hours.

  2. Serve with sugar or 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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Starch that swells and thickens the liquid as it cooks, giving the jelly its body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavour that cuts the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture until it boils. Tapioca starch only thickens fully once it reaches a boil and its granules swell and gelatinise. Stopping early leaves the jelly thin and grainy, and it will not set properly as it cools.

“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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