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Tapioca Blanc Mange

A sweet tapioca dessert made with milk, jam, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Tapioca Blanc Mange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Soak the tapioca in 1 pint of milk for 1 hour.

  2. Boil the soaked tapioca until tender.

Flavor and set

  1. Add a pinch of salt and sweeten to taste.

  2. Flavor with lemon or vanilla.

  3. Pour into a mold and let it cool.

Serve

  1. Once cold, turn it out and serve with jam and 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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Milk + strawberrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

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

  3. Strawberry + creamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,525 recipes

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

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Strawberry + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,206 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Its starch thickens the milk and gives the pudding its soft, slightly chewy texture as it cooks.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the tapioca absorbs and swells in, and forms the creamy body of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the mild, plain flavor of the milk and tapioca.

The step that matters

Boiling the soaked tapioca until tender. Tapioca pearls must be cooked long enough for their starch to fully gelatinize; undercooked pearls stay hard and opaque in the center, while stirring prevents scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, strawberry, cream. 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.

More tapioca pudding recipes

Apple 146Cream 36Pineapple 22Lemon 21Peach 15Baked 14 See all 530 →

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