Home › The Principles of Cookery › Tapioca Custard
Tapioca Custard
Wash two table-spoonfuls of tapioca, and boil it gently in a pint of milk until it is quite soft, stirring it frequently to keep it from getting into lumps. Add a piece of butter the size of a walnut and two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and when these are thoroughly mixed draw the saucepan on one side that the preparation may cool a little. Beat four fresh eggs in a bowl, mix gradually with them part of the tapioca, then pour them into the remainder in the sauce-pan, and stir all over the fire until the custard is on the point of boiling. Turn it out, flavour with vanilla, ratafia, almond, or any other flavouring, and when it is cold put it into a glass dish. Just before serving, crush an ounce of macaroons to powder, and sprinkle them over the surface, or if preferred sift a little powdered cinnamon over the top. Time to simmer the tapioca, about two hours. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A stirred custard thickened with both tapioca and egg, served cold in a glass dish. Two things date it: the tapioca, which was then a coarse unprocessed pearl, and the flavourings.
- The two-hour simmerThat time belongs to large, hard pearl tapioca of the period. Modern small pearl tapioca softens in 15-20 minutes in simmering milk, and instant (granulated) tapioca in about 5. Cook until the grains are translucent with no white centre, then proceed.
- Don't let the custard boilThis is the hinge. Once the eggs go in, hold the pan below a simmer and stir constantly; pull it off between 175 and 180F. "On the point of boiling" is the outer limit, and a few seconds past it gives you scrambled egg in sweet milk.
- Temper the eggs properlyThe instruction to mix part of the hot tapioca into the beaten eggs first is not optional. Add it a ladle at a time while whisking, then return everything to the pan.
- Butter the size of a walnutAn inexact period measure, usually taken as somewhere between 1 tablespoon and 1 oz. A shelled walnut is meant, not the nut in its shell.
- A pint of milkAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz. Using a US pint (16 oz) with the same tapioca gives a noticeably stiffer set; add a splash more milk if it thickens too far.
- RatafiaIn British kitchens a bitter-almond flavouring; the same name also covers a kernel-flavoured cordial. The nearest modern equivalent is almond extract or essence. Use it in drops rather than spoonfuls.
- MacaroonsCrisp almond macaroons or ratafia biscuits, crushed to a powder. Soft coconut macaroons will not crumble and will not work. Amaretti are the closest thing on a current shelf.
- Yield and holdingFour to five persons, as stated, served from a single glass dish. It must be fully cold before it goes into the dish, and the biscuit crumbs go on just before serving or they soften into paste.
Tapioca reached British kitchens as one of a family of imported starches - sago, arrowroot, tapioca - that Victorian cookery writers treated almost interchangeably for puddings and invalid cookery. It is made from the root of cassava, processed in Brazil and Southeast Asia and shipped as hard pearls or flake, and its reputation as light and easily digested is why recipes like this one turn up so often in the nursery and sickroom chapters of nineteenth-century books as well as among the sweets. Cassell's places this among the custards rather than the puddings, and the likely reason is that the eggs, not the starch, do the setting: the tapioca gives body and a pleasant slipperiness, the eggs give richness. The listed cost of a shilling and the range of flavourings - vanilla, ratafia, almond, "any other" - suggest what looks like the book's habit of offering one dependable method and letting the household bottle of essence decide what it tastes like.