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Dessert

Boiled Tapioca Pudding

A sweet pudding made from soaked tapioca cooked in milk, served with cream, sugar, and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Boiled Tapioca Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in water with a pinch of coarse sea salt until soft.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the soaked tapioca in milk for about 15 minutes, stirring constantly until it thickens to a jelly-like consistency.

  2. Pour the mixture into molds and let it set.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream, sugar, and currant jelly.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

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
Starch that swells and gelatinises in hot milk, thickening the pudding into a jelly-like texture.
Milk
Liquid that the tapioca absorbs and cooks in, giving the pudding its body and creamy flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the mild, neutral flavour of the milk and tapioca.

The step that matters

Stirring while the tapioca boils in milk. Tapioca starch settles and scorches on the bottom of the pan if left unattended, and constant stirring distributes heat so the starch swells evenly into a smooth, jelly-like set.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, 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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