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Dessert

Tapioca Cream Pudding

A creamy tapioca pudding made with milk, eggs, and sugar, finished with whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Tapioca Cream Pudding

Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Tapioca Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk in a pot.

  2. Stir in the soaked tapioca and boil for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Dissolve the corn-starch in ½ cup of milk.

  4. Add the beaten egg yolks to the corn-starch mixture.

  5. Stir the corn-starch and egg yolk mixture into the tapioca.

  6. Add a little salt and sweeten to taste, then bring to a boil.

  7. Add flavoring to taste.

Top and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites with the sugar until stiff.

  2. Add flavoring to the beaten egg whites.

  3. Spread the whipped egg whites over the pudding.

  4. Brown lightly in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  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. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 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 during soaking and boiling to thicken the milk into a pudding texture.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help thicken the pudding as they heat.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that forms the light topping and browns in the oven.
Corn-starch
Thickens the pudding when heated, giving a smoother, firmer set.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca cooks in, adding richness and body.

The step that matters

Boil the tapioca with constant stirring. Tapioca settles and scorches on the bottom of the pot if left alone, and it needs steady stirring while it cooks in the milk to swell evenly.

“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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