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Dessert

Tapioca Cream

A chilled dessert made from tapioca, milk, eggs, sugar, and lemon flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Tapioca Cream

Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tapioca Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca overnight in enough cold water to cover it.

Make the cream

  1. Bring the milk to a boil, then stir in the soaked tapioca and let it boil.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks, salt, and sugar, and let it boil again.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a serving dish and flavor with lemon.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and gently fold them into the mixture.

  2. Add an extra egg white just before serving.

  3. Serve chilled.

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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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, thickening the milk into a creamy, pudding-like body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca thickens into a cream.
Egg yolks
Enrich the cream and help it set smoothly as they cook with the milk.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and softens its flavor.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks and folded in, they lighten the texture of the cream.

The step that matters

Boiling the egg yolks into the mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble or curdle if the mixture boils too hard or too long, leaving the cream grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar. 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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