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Tapioca, Gratine
Drop ten ounces of tapioca into a stewpan with a quart of boiling milk. Add a slice of butter, a pinch of salt, sugar to taste, and the grated rind of a lemon. Boil, then simmer very gently, stirring all the time till tender. Pour the tapioca out, and when cool mix four eggs with it. If the eggs are added when the mixture is too hot it will curdle. Turn into a plain mould, which has been buttered and lined with bread-crumbs. Bake in a gentle oven till brown on the top. Turn out and serve.
A Victorian milk pudding dressed up in French clothing: the crumbed mould gives it a browned crust that lets it be turned out whole. Two things decide whether it works — the tapioca must be cooked until genuinely translucent, and the eggs must go in cool.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantTen ounces means whole pearl tapioca, something like 1¾ cups by volume, which absorbs the milk slowly and holds its shape. Modern quick-cooking or instant tapioca dissolves into paste at that ratio and will not set the same way; minute tapioca is not a substitute here.
- The eggs are the hingeThe recipe says so outright, and it is the one instruction to obey. Let the cooked tapioca drop to about lukewarm — under 140F — before beating in the four eggs, or the whites set into visible curds that no amount of stirring will smooth.
- "A slice of butter"Read it as roughly an ounce, about 2 tablespoons. It is there for richness, not structure, so a little more or less does no harm.
- "A gentle oven"Read as a low oven, somewhere around 300–325F. An egg-set pudding baked hotter than that will puff, weep and go grainy at the edges before the centre firms. Expect 45 minutes to an hour for a mould of about a litre and a half; it is done when the centre barely trembles.
- Soak to save stirringPearl tapioca left in the cold milk for an hour before heating cooks in a fraction of the time and is far less inclined to catch on the bottom. Even so, use a heavy pan and keep the simmer very low.
- Lining the mouldButter the mould generously and coat it with dry fine breadcrumbs, tapping out the loose ones. This is the gratiné — the crumbs brown and form the shell that lets the pudding release cleanly.
- Turning outLet it stand 10 to 15 minutes out of the oven before inverting. Straight from the heat it is too slack to hold; fully cold it sticks. Run a thin knife round the rim first.
- Lemon rindGrate only the coloured zest of an unwaxed or well-scrubbed lemon. Any white pith carried in will turn bitter over the long simmer.
- YieldServes six to eight as written. Good warm with stewed fruit or a fruit sauce.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, brought to British kitchens through the tropical trade and sold in the nineteenth century as "pearls" — small dried spheres graded by size. It arrived with a reputation for being light and easily digested, which is why tapioca puddings crowd the nursery and invalid-cookery chapters of Victorian household books, and why Cassell's carries a long run of them. Gratiné here carries its older, broader French sense: not cheese, but a surface browned in the oven, achieved by the buttered-and-crumbed mould that gives the finished pudding a thin crust and lets it be turned out standing upright. That final flourish is what separates this from a plain baked milk pudding served in its dish — the same mixture, promoted to a dinner sweet by the way it is moulded and presented.