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Tapioca Cream Custard

A custard made with tapioca, milk, sugar, eggs, and salt, thickened and chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tapioca Cream Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in water overnight.

  2. In a pot, bring the milk to a boil.

Make the custard

  1. Stir in the soaked tapioca and a pinch of salt until it thickens.

  2. Add the sugar and beaten egg yolks, stirring quickly.

  3. Pour the mixture into a dish and gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Flavor as desired and refrigerate until set.

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

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the custard its body and slightly chewy texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca thickens and the custard is built on.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds to its smooth, rounded flavor.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard with fat and help it set into a creamy texture.
Egg whites
Folded in at the end to lighten the custard and add airiness.

The step that matters

Stirring the tapioca into the boiling milk. Tapioca starch can clump if added unevenly or left unstirred, and it needs constant stirring as it thickens so the custard cooks smoothly and 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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