Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ruby Under Snow
Ruby Under Snow
Wash a quarter of a pint of tapioca, and let it soak for three or four hours in three-quarters of a pint of water, and with it the thin rind and strained juice of half a lemon. Take out the rind, and simmer the tapioca till it is clear, then mix with it six table-spoonfuls of red-currant jelly. Let it simmer three or four minutes longer, and pour it into a large dish. When it is quite cold and stiff, pile upon it a little whipped cream, or, if preferred, the whites of two eggs beaten till firm, and sweetened and flavoured with lemon-rind. This is a pretty and wholesome dish for a juvenile party. It should be made the day before it is wanted. If the whites of eggs are used they should be laid on at the last moment.
A Victorian nursery pudding that relies on tapioca setting to a clear scarlet jelly under a cap of white. The measurements are imperial and the tapioca is the old pearl kind, so both need translating.
- Imperial measuresA British pint is 20 fl oz, so a quarter pint of tapioca is 5 fl oz by volume (about 150 ml, perhaps 100-130 g of small pearls) and three-quarters of a pint of water is 15 fl oz, about 425 ml. The ratio matters more than the exact figures: rather more than three parts liquid to one of dry tapioca, once the lemon juice is counted.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe recipe depends on separate grains going translucent in a set jelly. Instant or minute tapioca dissolves into a thick opaque porridge and will give you a pink blancmange rather than a ruby. Small pearl tapioca, soaked as directed, is what is meant.
- The soak is not optionalThree or four hours of soaking is what lets the centres of the pearls hydrate; without it they simmer to a cloudy sludge on the outside with chalky white cores inside. Soak in the measured water so nothing is thrown away.
- Simmer gently and stirTapioca catches and scorches easily once it starts to thicken. Low heat, frequent stirring, and stop as soon as the grains are clear all the way through, usually 10 to 15 minutes. Overcooking breaks the pearls down and destroys the jewelled look the name promises.
- Redcurrant jellySix tablespoons is roughly 90 ml of the firm, tart preserve sold for serving with lamb and game, not a sweet jam. It supplies both the colour and the sweetness of the base, which the recipe otherwise leaves unsugared; a sweeter jelly will take a squeeze more lemon.
- SettingTapioca sets on cooling with no gelatine, but it needs a full night in the cold, as the recipe says. Pour into a shallow glass dish while hot, cover the surface with cling film if you dislike a skin, and refrigerate.
- The raw egg-white optionThe uncooked beaten whites are the version to think twice about. Piled on at the last moment and never heated, they carry the usual raw-egg risk, which is a poor idea for the "juvenile party" this was written for, and for anyone pregnant or elderly. Use pasteurised whites, or take the whipped cream the recipe offers first.
- YieldEnough for four to six small servings. It is best eaten within a day of setting; tapioca weeps as it stands longer.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, reached British kitchens through the colonial trade and by the mid-nineteenth century was a fixture of the nursery and the sickroom, valued as cheap, bland and easily digested. Cassell's treats it as a plain staple to be dressed up, and this is the dressing-up: redcurrant jelly for colour, lemon for sharpness, a cap of cream or meringue for the look of the thing. Names like Ruby Under Snow may reflect a Victorian habit of giving simple invalid and children's dishes a pretty title, perhaps in the manner of French menu writing, and the assumption that a dish should be made the day before speaks to a household where a cold larder, not a refrigerator, did the setting.