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Dessert

Tapioca Ice

A chilled dessert of tapioca pearls, pineapple, and sugar, served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca overnight in cold water.

  2. In the morning, boil the soaked tapioca in 1 quart of water until perfectly clear.

  3. Add the sugar and pineapple syrup to the tapioca.

  4. Chop the pineapple and mix it with the boiling hot tapioca.

Set and serve

  1. Turn the mixture into a wet mold.

  2. Once cold, turn it out and serve with cream and sugar.

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. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Thickens as it cooks and turns clear, giving the ice its gel-like body.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and softens the set, so the ice is not rigid.
Pineapple
Adds fruit flavour and acidity, with its syrup contributing sweetness and moisture.

The step that matters

Boiling the soaked tapioca until perfectly clear. Tapioca starch must be fully boiled to gelatinise; under-cooked pearls stay opaque and chalky, leaving a grainy texture in the finished ice.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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.

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