Skip to main content
Dessert

Tapioca Cream

A sweet, thick pudding made from tapioca, milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Tapioca Cream

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Tapioca Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca overnight in cold water.

  2. Bring the milk to a boil.

  3. Add the soaked tapioca, draining off the water first.

  4. Cook for 20 minutes.

Make the pudding

  1. Add the beaten yolks of the eggs, ½ cup sugar, and salt.

  2. Boil for 2 more minutes.

  3. Stir in the vanilla.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

  5. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites mixed with the remaining sugar.

  6. Pour into a pudding dish.

  7. Brown the top.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 cooking to thicken the milk into a pudding.
Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they cook; whites, whipped, lighten the finished pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca thickens and the eggs enrich.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the whipped egg whites hold their structure.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg yolks. Yolks thicken as they heat, but if the hot mixture is boiled too hard or too long after adding them, they can scramble and turn grainy. Keep the heat gentle and stir constantly.

“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 →

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes