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A Delicious Dessert
Put a cup of tapioca to soak over night; in the morning cook it with one quart of warm water in a farina kettle until soft. In the mean time have six or eight good apples steamed a little, after having first pared them and taken out the cores, then fill the cavities with sugar and a little lemon juice or nutmeg; then pour the mixture of tapioca around the apples, and bake about half an hour. Sauce, sweet cream and sugar.
A late nineteenth-century baked apple and tapioca pudding that depends on two things the original assumes you know: the tapioca must be old-style pearl, and the kettle it cooks in is a double boiler.
- Pearl tapioca, not instantThe overnight soak only makes sense for large or small pearl tapioca, which needs hours to hydrate. Instant or minute tapioca will dissolve to glue; quick-cooking granules would need no soak at all.
- A farina kettle is a double boilerA lidded inner pan set over simmering water in an outer one, sold for cooking cereals without scorching. Any double boiler works, or a heatproof bowl over a pan of water. Tapioca sticks and burns over direct heat, which is the whole reason the vessel is specified.
- Cook to translucency"Until soft" means the pearls have gone from opaque white to clear with only a faint white speck at the centre. In a double boiler expect the better part of an hour, with occasional stirring. The mixture will look thin and slack; it thickens as it cools and bakes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only to bake. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for the half hour stated, the apples having already been partly steamed.
- Steaming the apples"Steamed a little" means par-cooked, five to eight minutes, so they hold their shape but are no longer raw at the surface. Use a firm baking apple that will not collapse; a soft eating apple will slump into the tapioca.
- Sweeten the tapioca tooThe recipe sugars only the apple cavities, which leaves the surrounding tapioca bland by modern palates. A third to half a cup of sugar stirred into the cooked tapioca, plus a pinch of salt, brings it into balance.
- Dish and yieldSix to eight apples need a wide shallow baking dish, roughly 9x13 inches, so each sits in the tapioca rather than being buried. It serves six to eight, one apple each.
- The sauce"Sweet cream" means fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to soured cream. The recipe specifies only cream and sugar, and gives no further instruction for serving.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, arrived in American kitchens through the Atlantic trade and came to be a staple of the cheap, digestible dessert: puddings and the nursery and invalid cookery that filled the dessert chapters of household manuals. A dish built on a cup of dry starch and a handful of autumn apples fits that logic exactly. The farina kettle named here was standard equipment in the period, sold for oatmeal and cracked wheat at breakfast and pressed into service for anything starchy that would catch on a bare pan. Baked whole apples with sugared cavities are much older than the tapioca around them; combining the two gives a single dish that supplies its own thickened sauce, needing only cream at the table.