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Tapioca Cream
Soak over night two table-spoons tapioca in one-half tea-cup milk (or enough to cover); bring one quart milk to boiling point; beat well together the yolks of three eggs, half tea-cup sugar, and one tea-spoon lemon or vanilla for flavoring, add the tapioca, and stir the whole into the boiling milk, let boil once, turn into the dish, and immediately spread on the whites. Serve when cold. -Mrs. R. M. Henderson.
A stirred custard thickened with tapioca and finished with a raw meringue spread over the hot surface. The whole thing hinges on the eggs: the custard must thicken without curdling, and the instruction to "let boil once" is the risky moment.
- Tapioca to buyThe overnight soak tells you this is old-fashioned pearl tapioca, not the instant or "minute" granules sold today. Small pearl tapioca still wants several hours in liquid; if you use minute tapioca it hydrates in the hot milk in about five minutes and the soaking step becomes pointless.
- Tea-cupA tea-cup was commonly reckoned at somewhere around 6 fl oz, though the book does not fix the measure, so half a tea-cup is roughly 1/3 cup. It is not a precise measure, and for the sugar anything from 1/4 to 1/2 cup works; err low if the pudding is for serving with fruit.
- Table-spoonsNineteenth-century table-spoons could run larger than the modern 15 ml, so two of them of dry tapioca may be nearer three tablespoons now; against a quart of milk that gives a loose, pourable cream rather than a set pudding.
- The one instruction that matters"Let boil once" means bring it just back to the first bubble and pull it off. Egg yolks in milk set around 180F and curdle above about 185F; a genuine rolling boil will scramble the custard. Temper the yolk mixture with a ladle of hot milk before it goes into the pan, and stir constantly.
- If it does curdleStrain it immediately into a cold bowl and whisk hard. A slightly broken custard usually comes back; one that has gone to visible curds does not.
- The meringueThe whites go on raw and are never cooked, since the pudding is served cold. If that is a concern, use pasteurized whites, or beat the whites with a couple of spoons of sugar and brown the top in a moderate oven.
- FlavoringA teaspoon of lemon here means lemon extract, not juice; juice will curdle the milk. Add the extract or vanilla after the custard comes off the heat so the flavor does not cook off.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk makes about six servings. Cover the surface loosely or the meringue weeps, and give it at least three hours in the cold to firm up.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders into Africa and Asia; by the mid-nineteenth century much of the pearl tapioca reaching American kitchens came through Singapore and the East Indies, sold in small hard beads that had to be soaked before they would soften. Cookbooks of the 1870s file it with sago, arrowroot and rice as a bland, easily digested starch: food for invalids, children and the nursery as much as for the dinner table, which is part of why it turns up so often in the creams-and-custards chapters of books like Buckeye Cookery (1877). The pattern here -- a boiled egg custard poured out hot with beaten whites spread over the top -- is the same construction as a floating island or a snow pudding, and the attribution to Mrs. R. M. Henderson is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributed recipes printed with their contributors' names attached.