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Apple Tapioca Pudding
One coffee-cupful tapioca, covered with three pints of cold water, and soaked over night. In the morning set it on the side of the range, or stove, stirring it often until it becomes transparent. If too thick, add more water, until it is as thin as good, clear starch. Stir in a small teaspoonful of salt. Pare and core, without breaking, as many good apples as will lie close on the bottom of a medium-sized pudding-dish. Fill the holes full of sugar, and a very little nutmeg and cinnamon; then pour over the tapioca, and bake slowly until the apples are soft and well done. To be eaten with hard sauce, which is made as follows: One cup sugar, two-thirds of a cup butter, beaten together until perfectly smooth and white.
A plain baked apple pudding built on soaked pearl tapioca. The instructions assume a coal range with a cool spot and a stock of large tapioca pearls, both of which need translating.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe overnight soak and the long stir to transparency only make sense with large or medium pearl tapioca. Instant or "minute" tapioca is pre-cooked and will dissolve into paste; quick-cooking granules need no soaking at all.
- A coffee-cupfulReckon it as roughly 1 cup, though period coffee cups were often a little smaller. Note the ratio: about 1 cup tapioca to 3 pints (6 cups) water, deliberately loose, since the pearls swell and the apples add only a little juice of their own.
- "The side of the range"This means gentle, indirect heat, not a boil. On a modern hob use the lowest setting or a double boiler, stirring often; tapioca scorches on the bottom of a thin pan and turns gluey if boiled hard.
- As thin as clear starchThis is the hinge. The mixture should pour, not mound. If it thickens to pudding consistency before baking, it will set into a rubbery block in the oven; thin it with hot water until it flows off the spoon.
- Bake slowlyA slow oven, in modern terms somewhere around 300-325F, for perhaps 1 to 1 1/4 hours, until a skewer meets no resistance in the apples. Use firm baking apples that hold their shape rather than a sauce apple that collapses.
- Filling the cored holesPerhaps 1 to 2 teaspoons sugar per apple with a scrape of nutmeg and a pinch of cinnamon. Coring 'without breaking' at least means keeping each apple whole; leaving the blossom end intact is one way to stop the sugar running out.
- Hard sauce1 cup sugar to 2/3 cup softened butter, creamed pale. Confectioners' sugar gives the smooth result the recipe describes; granulated stays gritty unless beaten a long time. Chill it firm and serve cold on the hot pudding.
- YieldHowever many apples sit close-packed on the bottom of the dish, so roughly that many servings. The tapioca quantity is generous for that; expect a thick clear layer around and over the fruit.
Tapioca is cassava starch, processed into pearls and shipped from Brazil and the East Indies, and by the mid-nineteenth century it had become a cheap, shelf-stable thickener in American and British kitchens alongside sago and arrowroot. Apple tapioca was one of its standard uses: a way of turning a few apples into a full pudding with almost no eggs, milk or butter, which made it popular in household manuals aimed at economical cooks. The hard sauce that finishes it belongs to the older English tradition of creamed butter-and-sugar sauces served cold on hot puddings, often traced to the brandy butter eaten with Christmas pudding, and here left plain and unspirited.