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Dessert

Apple Tapioca

A dessert of soaked tapioca cooked with apples, flavored with citrus peel, and served with cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Apple Tapioca

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in cold water overnight.

Make the pudding

  1. Cook the apples until they become a rich, sweet sauce.

  2. Add the soaked tapioca to the apple sauce and cook slowly until dissolved.

  3. Flavor with lemon or orange peel and sweeten to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream sauce.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Thickens the apple sauce into a soft, pudding-like texture as it dissolves.
Apples
Cook down into a rich, sweet sauce that forms the base of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding to the cook's taste.
Lemon peel
Adds a bright aroma that brightens the sweet apple flavor.
Orange peel
Adds a citrusy aroma that complements the apples.

The step that matters

Cooking the tapioca slowly until dissolved. Tapioca must cook long enough over gentle heat to fully soften and dissolve. Cooking too fast can scorch the sauce on the bottom of the pan or leave the starch granules partly raw, giving a grainy texture.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, sugar, cream, sauce. 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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