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Jelly Pudding
One tea-cup tapioca, three pints water, wash the tapioca and soak in the water it is to be cooked in, over night. In the morning put it in a farina kettle and cook until done; add a little salt, half tea-cup granulated sugar, one tumbler currant jelly, wet a mould and pour the pudding in, when cold turn it out and serve with sweetened cream.
A molded tapioca pudding that sets on starch alone, with no gelatin and no eggs. The whole thing turns on using real pearl tapioca and cooking it gently until every grain is clear.
- Use pearl tapiocaThis calls for pearl tapioca, washed and soaked overnight in the same water it cooks in. Instant or minute tapioca is pre-cooked and ground, and will turn the mixture to paste rather than a suspension of distinct clear beads.
- Teacup and tumblerA teacup in American books of this period is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz, though usage varied, so roughly 3/4 cup of tapioca and 6 tablespoons of sugar. A tumbler is generally taken as about 8 fl oz, so figure a full cup of currant jelly — most modern jars are 10 to 12 oz, near enough.
- Farina kettleThat is a double boiler. Tapioca scorches and sticks over direct heat, and the gentle indirect cooking is what keeps the grains whole. A heavy saucepan over low heat with frequent stirring will do if you have no insert.
- "Cook until done"Done means every pearl is translucent all the way through with no white center. After an overnight soak this may take anywhere from about half an hour to an hour in a double boiler. Undercooked cores stay chalky and will not soften later.
- When to add the jellyThe recipe does not say whether the pan is off the heat. Stirring the jelly in after the tapioca is cooked and the salt and sugar are dissolved, away from the heat, keeps the fresh red-currant flavor and color, which prolonged boiling tends to dull.
- Molding and unmoldingRinsing the mold with cold water and leaving it wet is what lets the pudding slip out; do not grease it. It needs at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better. A brief dip of the mold in warm water frees the edges.
- Sweetened creamNot whipped — this means pouring cream with a little sugar stirred through, served in a jug alongside. Heavy or light cream both work; the pudding is quite sweet, so keep the sugar in the cream restrained.
- YieldThree pints of liquid makes a substantial pudding, enough for six to eight. Note that three pints is 1.5 quarts before the sugar and jelly go in, so allow a mould of about two quarts.
Tapioca is the washed starch of the cassava root, shipped to nineteenth-century American and British kitchens in dried pearls from Brazil and Southeast Asia; it kept well in a jar and swelled to many times its bulk, which made it useful in thrifty dessert cookery. Puddings like this one belong to a large family of molded, chilled sweets that filled the dessert chapters of household books around 1900, when decorative tin molds were common equipment and a shape turned out whole at table counted as presentation. The currant jelly points to a domestic pantry: red currants are high enough in pectin to set firmly without added pectin, and currant jelly was a common home preserve, so a tumbler of it might well be on the shelf in midwinter, ready to color and flavor a plain starch pudding.