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Tapioca Pudding, Baked
Wash four table-spoonfuls of tapioca in water, then let it boil with a quart of milk and the thin rind of a lemon or an orange, or an inch of cinnamon. Pour it into a basin, let it get cold, sweeten it, and take out the peel. Beat it up with three eggs and an ounce of butter. Pour it into a buttered dish, and bake the pudding in a well-heated oven. The edge of the dish may be lined with puff-paste or not. Time to bake, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain milk-and-tapioca custard, thickened on the stove and then set in the oven. The original assumes you know how long pearl tapioca takes to soften, which is the one point it leaves out.
- Get the tapioca fully soft firstSimmer it gently in the milk until the pearls are translucent with no white centre — 15 to 20 minutes for small pearl tapioca, longer for large pearls, stirring often since it catches on the bottom. Any grain still opaque when it goes into the oven will stay gritty.
- Which tapiocaUse small pearl or seed tapioca. Instant or minute tapioca is pre-gelatinised and will thicken to paste in a few minutes, throwing off the texture; large pearls of the bubble-tea sort need soaking and are the wrong scale here.
- Cooling is not optionalThe mixture must be genuinely cold, or at least below blood heat, before the eggs go in. Beating three eggs into hot tapioca scrambles them and the pudding bakes speckled and weeping.
- MeasurementsFour tablespoons of dry tapioca is about 13⁄4 oz (50 g); a quart of milk is 4 cups, and the Victorian imperial quart is closer to 5 cups if you want the looser original. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given. Start at 1⁄3 cup sugar for a quart of milk and taste the cold mixture, remembering it will seem less sweet warm.
- "A well-heated oven"For a milk-and-egg custard this is best taken as a moderate oven, somewhere around 325–350°F, despite the phrase suggesting a brisker heat; hotter and the custard curdles at the edges before the centre sets. Three-quarters of an hour is about right for a 2-quart dish; it is done when the middle is just barely wobbly.
- The puff-paste edgeA band of puff pastry around the rim was a common dressing for baked puddings, and the recipe treats it as optional ("lined with puff-paste or not"). Puff pastry rises best in a hotter oven than a custard wants, so the two do not sit easily together.
- YieldFive or six as the book says, served warm. Cold, it firms considerably and cuts almost like a set custard.
Tapioca, the washed starch of the cassava root, was familiar in British kitchens by the nineteenth century through colonial trade and was marketed as a light, digestible starch suited to invalids and children — the same commercial niche as arrowroot and sago, which appear alongside it in Cassell's. Its arrival in the milk-pudding repertoire is essentially a substitution: the method here, thickening milk with a grain, flavouring it with lemon peel or a stick of cinnamon, then enriching with eggs and butter and setting it in the oven, is the old rice- and semolina-pudding formula with a new starch dropped into it. The stated cost of a shilling for a dish feeding five or six is a reminder of what these puddings were for in a Victorian household: they stretched a quart of milk into a filling course at the end of a meal, and the priced entry let a cook or housekeeper budget before she started.