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Tapioca Soup
Take as much properly-seasoned clear cold stock as may be required, and put it into the stewpan with an ounce of well-washed tapioca to each pint of stock. Bring the preparation gradually to the point of boiling, then simmer it gently until tender, and stir it frequently to keep it from getting into lumps. A white soup may be made by using veal stock, and adding little boiling cream or milk to the soup just before serving. Time to simmer the tapioca, an hour or more from the time the soup boils. Probable cost, varying with the quality of the stock. Sufficient, a quart of soup for four or five persons.
A thickened clear soup of the plainest Victorian sort, and the whole thing stands or falls on the stock. Two details need translating: the tapioca sold today is not the tapioca Cassell's had in mind, and the hour of simmering goes with it.
- The hinge: which tapiocaThe book assumes hard pearl tapioca, which genuinely wants a long soak or a long simmer. Modern small pearl cooks through in a fraction of the time simply because the beads are smaller, and quick-cooking or instant tapioca is pre-cooked, so it softens almost at once and will give you paste rather than beads. Buy large or medium pearl if you want the effect described.
- An hour is for the old productSimmer only until the beads are translucent right through with no white centre. With anything but true hard pearl, an hour turns the soup into a gluey mass, since tapioca keeps absorbing and swelling as it stands.
- An ounce to the pintAbout 30 g per 570 ml, which is a generously thickened soup by current taste. Half that gives a lightly bodied consomme with beads suspended in it; judge after the tapioca has finished swelling, not before.
- Clear cold stockCold here means unheated rather than chilled to a jelly, and 'clear' most likely implies a clarified stock rather than one merely strained. Any cloudiness or fat is very visible in a soup with no other body to hide it, so skim the set fat off the top and pour off the sediment.
- StirringTapioca sinks and welds to the pan base. Stir from the bottom every few minutes, and keep the heat at a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil, which breaks the beads and clouds the stock.
- The white versionVeal stock is now hard to find; a light chicken stock behaves the same way. Warm the cream or milk first and stir it in off the heat, then do not let the soup boil again or it may separate.
- Yield and holdingThe book gives a quart as enough for four or five as a first course. It does not hold well: the tapioca goes on absorbing and the soup sets almost solid on cooling, so make it close to service and loosen with a little hot stock if needed.
Tapioca is the washed starch of the cassava root, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders through West Africa and Asia; it reached British grocers as hard white pearls. Victorian cooks valued it for exactly the qualities on show here, being bland, cheap, easy to keep and quick to give body to a thin liquid, and it turns up as often in nursery and invalid cookery as at the dinner table, where a clear soup studded with translucent beads was thought both delicate and nourishing. The dish is really a lesson in garnishing a consomme: the stock does all the work, and the starch is only there to give the spoon something to find.