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General Grant Pudding
Eight tablespoons tapioca, put to soak over night in water enough to cover it. In the morning boil two quarts milk, take the yolks of six eggs, and two cups of sugar, a little salt, beat with the tapioca, and stir them into the milk. Take the latter off the fire and stir gradually that it may not curdle; boil about ten minutes, flavor to taste. Pour it into your pudding dish, and when cool make frosting with the whites of the eggs, and spread it on, and brown in a quick oven. Two whites of eggs are better, put in the pudding; use the other four for frosting. If you have not a farina kettle, set it in a tin pail in a kettle of boiling water.
A tapioca custard under a meringue cap, cooked in a double boiler. The recipe is workable as written; the wording just needs untangling.
- The tapiocaEight tablespoons is half a cup. This calls for old-style pearl or large-grain tapioca, which genuinely needs the overnight soak; quick-cooking minute tapioca will dissolve to paste and should not be substituted at the same volume.
- Read the sentences out of orderThe directions double back on themselves. The working sequence is: scald the milk, beat the yolks with sugar, salt and soaked tapioca, take the milk off the heat, temper the egg mixture into it gradually, then return it to gentle heat for about ten minutes until thickened.
- "Farina kettle"A double boiler. The improvised version described at the end — a tin pail standing in a kettle of boiling water — is exactly the same thing, and worth using: two quarts of milk thickened with yolks will scorch and curdle over direct heat.
- How many whitesThe recipe changes its mind. Beating two whites into the pudding gives a lighter set and leaves four for the meringue, which is the better proportion for a dish this size.
- "A quick oven"A hot oven; period reckonings put this somewhere around 400-450F. The meringue colors in a few minutes; watch it rather than timing it, since the pudding beneath is already cooked.
- Meringue on a cool baseThe recipe has you cool the pudding before frosting it. Spread the beaten whites right to the edges of the dish so they seal against the rim, or the meringue is liable to shrink and weep.
- Flavoring"flavor to taste" would typically mean something like vanilla, lemon rind or rosewater, added after the pudding leaves the heat, as the recipe's own order implies.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk plus sugar and tapioca fills a large deep dish and serves ten to twelve. Chill leftovers promptly; this is an egg custard.
Naming puddings, cakes and salads after generals and presidents was a familiar habit in American community and household cookbooks after the Civil War, and Ulysses S. Grant — commanding general, then president from 1869 to 1877 — was among those so honored. The name tells you almost nothing about the dish, which is a plain boiled tapioca custard finished with meringue; the connection is honorific rather than culinary. Tapioca, milled from cassava root and imported largely through Brazil and the East Indies, became cheap and widely available in American groceries in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it filled the same role as sago and cornstarch: a thickener that stretched milk and eggs into a substantial sweet dish. The aside about the farina kettle is the most revealing line on the page, a reminder that a purpose-made double boiler was still a piece of equipment a cook might not own.