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Tapioca Pudding, Simple
Wash and drain a tea-cupful of tapioca, and put it into a buttered baking-dish large enough to hold about three pints. Sprinkle over it a table-spoonful of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a little nutmeg, cinnamon, or lemon-peel, and fill the dish with cold milk. Put in a piece of butter the size of a small nut and bake the pudding in a moderate oven. When the surface of the pudding is covered with a brightly-browned skin it is done enough. Send sugar to table with the pudding. Time to bake, about two hours. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A slow, unsweetened baked milk pudding of the plainest Victorian kind — the sugar is handed round at the table rather than stirred in. Almost everything depends on giving the tapioca enough liquid and enough time to swell.
- The hinge: liquid and patiencePearl tapioca absorbs several times its volume, and here it is put in dry with no pre-soaking. It must have the full two hours in gentle heat, and the dish must be genuinely filled with milk, or you get a stiff, chalky mass with hard centres in the grains. An hour's soak in some of the milk before baking does no harm and helps the grains cook evenly.
- Tea-cupfulIn Cassell's period a teacupful is usually reckoned at about a quarter of a pint, so roughly 150 ml of dry tapioca by volume (nearer 4 oz than 5 by weight). A three-pint dish will then take something like two and a half pints (1.4 litres) of milk once the tapioca and crumbs are in.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 325–350F (160–175C). At the lower end of that range the two hours produce the slow set and the browned skin the recipe wants; hotter and the milk catches at the edges before the tapioca has softened.
- Which tapiocaUse pearl or seed tapioca, not the instant or quick-cooking flake sold today, and not the large boba pearls. Instant tapioca is pre-gelatinised and will collapse into glue over two hours.
- Washing and drainingWorth doing as directed — it removes loose starch and keeps the finished pudding from being gummy.
- Butter the size of a small nutAbout half an ounce, 15 g. Its job is the browned top, not richness.
- FlavouringChoose one: a grating of nutmeg, a pinch of cinnamon, or a strip of lemon peel laid on top and lifted out before serving. The peel gives the cleanest flavour in an otherwise unsweetened pudding.
- Serving and sugarSix or seven modest portions. Sending the sugar separately lets each eater sweeten to taste. Demerara or caster both work; stewed fruit or jam suits it.
Tapioca is starch washed out of the root of cassava (manioc), a South American plant carried by Portuguese and other traders through Africa and Asia; by the middle of the nineteenth century British kitchens bought it ready-processed as pearls or flakes, largely from Brazil and the East Indies. That processing matters: raw cassava contains cyanogenic compounds and must be grated, pressed and heated before it is edible, work that was done at source, so the cook in a London kitchen met only a bland white starch. Cassell's treats it alongside sago, semolina and ground rice as one of the cheap thickening starches that carried the Victorian milk pudding, a dish valued for nursery and sickroom feeding as much as for dessert — hence the plainness here, and the ninepence.