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Tapioca Cream Sauce

A custard-like sauce made with tapioca, milk, eggs, and sugar, served cold over fruit.

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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tapioca base

  1. In a double boiler, cook hot milk, tapioca, and salt for 15 minutes, stirring frequently.

  2. Beat together egg yolks and sugar.

  3. After 15 minutes, stir the egg yolk mixture into the milk and tapioca.

  4. Cook until the mixture thickens like custard.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and fold in beaten egg whites until no white is visible.

  2. Add desired flavoring.

  3. Serve cold over fresh fruit like strawberries, raspberries, peaches, or oranges.

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. Egg + sugartop 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and thicken it as they cook with the milk into a custard.
Minute tapioca
Thickens the hot milk as its starch swells during cooking, giving the sauce body.
Egg whites
Folded in at the end to lighten the sauce's texture with trapped air.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the richness of the milk and yolks.
Hot milk
Forms the liquid base that the tapioca thickens into a cream sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk mixture. Stirring the yolks into hot milk without tempering or constant stirring can scramble them. Cooking gently while stirring keeps the sauce smooth as the yolks thicken it.

“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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