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Dessert

Tapioca Fruit Pudding

A sweet pudding made from tapioca, water, salt, sugar, fruit, and served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Tapioca Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Rinse the tapioca and soak it in 1 pint of water overnight or until it swells.

  2. Add boiling water and ¼ teaspoon salt, then simmer slowly until clear and thickened.

  3. Stir in white sugar to taste.

Assemble and bake

  1. If the fruit doesn't bake quickly, stew it until tender first.

  2. In a pudding dish, layer the hot tapioca and fruit until the dish is full.

  3. Bake until clear.

Serve

  1. Serve cold with cream.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells and sets into a clear, gel-like pudding.
Fruit of choice
Adds flavour, moisture and natural sweetness to the pudding layers.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tart or plain flavour of the fruit and tapioca.

The step that matters

Simmering the tapioca until clear and thickened. Tapioca starch must be fully cooked and gelatinised to thicken properly. Stopping early leaves a cloudy, starchy texture, while overcooking can make the pudding gummy.

“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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