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Orange Tapioca Pudding
One cup tapioca, soaked over night in one pint water; in the morning add one quart of boiling water, and let it cook until it is like starch; one cup sugar. and the juice and grated rind of three oranges. Make a souffla of the whites of three eggs, two tablespoons powdered sugar; spread on the pudding and set it in the oven long enough to brown. To be eaten with sweetened cream.
A Victorian tapioca pudding of the plainest kind, lifted by orange and topped with meringue. Two things decide whether it works: the overnight soak and how you handle the juice.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe recipe assumes small pearl tapioca, which needs the long soak to soften through. Modern instant or minute tapioca is pre-cooked and will turn to paste if treated this way; if that is all you have, follow the box instead.
- The soak is not optionalOne cup tapioca in a pint (2 cups) of cold water overnight lets the pearls hydrate evenly. Skipping it leaves opaque, chalky centres no amount of boiling will fix.
- "Like starch"Cook until the pearls are translucent with no white dot in the middle and the mass is thick and glossy, roughly 15-25 minutes over low heat, stirring often. It thickens further as it cools, so stop while it still pours.
- Add the orange off the heatStir in the sugar, juice and grated rind after the tapioca has come off the burner. Boiling citrus juice with the starch drives off the fresh aroma and the acid can thin the set.
- "Souffla" means meringueBeat the three whites to stiff peaks, then beat in the two tablespoons of powdered sugar. Two tablespoons for three whites is a very lean meringue by modern standards and will be soft rather than crisp; up to a third of a cup gives a more stable topping.
- Oven for browningSpread the meringue over the pudding while it is still hot, sealing it to the edges of the dish, and brown in a hot oven, around 400F, for 8-10 minutes, watching it closely; the recipe itself gives no temperature, only 'long enough to brown.' Hot filling helps set the underside of the meringue; a cold pudding gives a weeping layer.
- Grate the rind firstZest all three oranges before juicing them. Take only the coloured layer, since the white pith underneath is bitter.
- Yield and servingEnough for roughly six to eight. 'Sweetened cream' is cold cream with a little sugar stirred in, usually poured over rather than whipped.
Tapioca, the starch extracted from cassava root, reached North American and British kitchens in quantity through nineteenth-century tropical trade, and by the later nineteenth century it was a fixture of the household dessert repertoire: cheap, shelf-stable, and gentle enough to be recommended for invalids and children. Books of this sort often carry several tapioca puddings together, distinguished only by their flavouring. The orange version belongs to the same period habit of dressing a plain starch pudding with a meringue lid, the whites doing decorative duty while the yolks went elsewhere in the day's cooking. 'Souffla' here plainly stands for a meringue topping; whether it is a misprint or a loose spelling cannot be established from the page.