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Tapioca Pudding, Boiled
Wash two table-spoonfuls of tapioca, and let it soak in a pint of milk for an hour. Put it into a saucepan with an ounce of butter, a table-spoonful of sugar, and the thin rind of a lemon or an orange, or any flavouring that may be preferred. Let it boil, then stir it over a gentle fire for a quarter of an hour. Pour it out, remove the rind, and let the tapioca cool. Stir in with it the yolks of four eggs and the whites of two well-beaten. Pour the pudding into a buttered mould, and boil or steam it until done enough. Let it stand in the mould for some minutes after it is taken up before turning it out. It will be necessary to handle it very carefully or it will break. Sift powdered sugar thickly over it, and send a dish of cream to table with it. The appearance of the pudding will be improved if it is garnished with any kind of bright-coloured jelly or jam. Time to boil, an hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A steamed egg-and-tapioca custard turned out of a mould — closer to a delicate baked custard than to the nursery tapioca pudding of later memory. Two things decide whether it works: the tapioca must be properly softened before the eggs go in, and the mixture must be cool enough not to scramble them.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe tapioca of this period would have been small dried pearls, which need the full soak and simmer to swell and go translucent. Instant or minute tapioca is pre-gelatinised and will turn to paste; large boba pearls will not soften in this quantity of milk.
- The pint is imperialA British pint in this book is 20 fl oz, so use 2.5 US cups of milk to 2 tablespoons of tapioca. The ratio looks thin in the pan and thickens considerably as it cooks and again as it cools.
- Cool before the eggsThe hinge of the recipe. Let the cooked tapioca drop to lukewarm — hand-warm at most — before stirring in the yolks and beaten whites, or you will get threads of cooked egg through the pudding. If in doubt, temper: beat a little warm tapioca into the eggs first, then return it.
- "Stir it over a gentle fire for a quarter of an hour"That means the lowest possible simmer with near-constant stirring; tapioca and milk catch and scorch readily. A heavy pan, or a bowl over simmering water, makes it far easier.
- Setting up the mouldButter a 1-quart pudding basin or mould generously, fill it no more than three-quarters full, and cover the top tightly with buttered parchment and foil, or a tied cloth, so no condensation drips in. Stand it on a trivet in a pan with simmering water reaching halfway up the sides, lid on, and top up with boiling water as it falls.
- Time and donenessAn hour and a half at a bare simmer is about right for a quart mould, but go by the pudding: it is done when a thin skewer inserted at the centre comes out clean and the mixture no longer wobbles loosely. Hard boiling will curdle the custard and make it weep.
- Turning outThe rest in the mould for some minutes is not optional — it lets the edges contract and firm. Run a thin knife round the rim, invert onto a warmed dish, and expect a fragile pudding; served straight from the basin it tastes identical.
- Flavouring and finishPare the lemon or orange rind thinly with no pith, and fish out every piece before the eggs go in. Sifted powdered sugar and a jug of cream are called for, with any bright-coloured jelly or jam — redcurrant or apricot, say — as the garnish.
- YieldFour or five small servings, as stated. The "probable cost, 1s. 2d." is a Victorian housekeeping figure and belongs to the book, not to your shopping.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders across the tropics; by the second half of the nineteenth century Britain was importing it in quantity as small dried pearls, largely from Southeast Asia, and grocers sold it alongside sago and arrowroot as one of the cheap "farinaceous foods." Those starches had a particular place in Victorian domestic cookery: they were considered light and easily digested, and so appear constantly in chapters on invalid and children's diet as well as in the pudding lists. What Cassell's gives here, though, is the dressed-up version — a moulded, egg-enriched, boiled pudding turned out and garnished with jelly, in the tradition of the boiled puddings that dominated English tables before the domestic oven became reliable enough for baked custards to be the default. The instruction to steam or boil in a buttered mould, rest it, and handle it carefully is the standard grammar of that whole family of dishes.