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Dessert

Indian Pudding with Tapioca

A sweet pudding made with tapioca, Indian meal, milk, molasses, and fat, baked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,243 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Indian Pudding with Tapioca

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca overnight in ½ cup water.

  2. Mix ¼ cup cold milk with the Indian meal.

Make the pudding

  1. Heat the remaining milk in a double boiler.

  2. Add the soaked tapioca, meal mixture, fat, and salt to the heated milk.

  3. Cook until the mixture thickens.

  4. Remove from heat, stir in the molasses.

Bake

  1. Pour into a greased pudding dish and bake for 1 hour.

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 + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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 pudding texture.
Indian meal
Adds body and thickening to the milk as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the thickeners cook into a custard-like pudding.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and a deep, caramel-like flavor to the pudding.

The step that matters

Cooking until the mixture thickens. Starches thicken as they absorb liquid and heat. Stopping too early leaves the pudding thin, while overcooking can scorch the milk on the bottom of the pan, so stir steadily and watch the texture closely.

“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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