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Cream Tapioca Pudding
Soak three tablespoons of tapioca in water overnight; put the tapioca into a quart of boiling milk and boil three-quarters of an hour; beat the yolks of four eggs into a cup of sugar, add three tablespoons of prepared cocoanut, stir in and boil ten minutes longer; pour into a pudding dish, beat the whites of the four eggs to a stiff froth, and stir in three tablespoons of sugar; put this over top, sprinkle with cocoanut and brown for five minutes.
— Mrs. Zobles T. Cater
A Victorian boiled tapioca custard finished with a meringue cap. Two instructions need rethinking: the long hard boil of the milk and the ten-minute boil after the yolks go in.
- The hinge: do not boil the yolksThe hinge: don't hold the yolks at a boil -- Once the beaten yolks and sugar go in, ten minutes at a full boil risks curdling the custard, though the tapioca starch in the pan gives some protection. Safer to temper the yolk-sugar mixture with a ladle of the hot tapioca, return it to the pan, and cook over low heat, stirring, until it thickens and reaches about 175F.
- Tapioca and the overnight soakThe soak is written for old-style pearl tapioca, which needs it. Small pearl or granulated tapioca soaks in an hour or two; instant/minute tapioca needs no soak at all and will dissolve to glue if given three-quarters of an hour of boiling. Three tablespoons of pearl to a quart of milk gives a loose, spoonable pudding rather than a set one.
- Cooking the milkA quart of milk at a rolling boil for 45 minutes will scorch on a modern thin-bottomed pan and will reduce. Use a heavy pan at a bare simmer, or a double boiler, and stir often.
- Prepared cocoanutThis means the packaged desiccated or shredded coconut sold ready-grated, as opposed to a whole nut cracked and grated at home. Sweetened flaked coconut is the nearest supermarket equivalent; if you use it, cut the sugar in the custard by a tablespoon or two.
- Browning the meringue"Brown for five minutes" implies a hot oven, though the recipe names no temperature: high in the oven, or a few minutes under a broiler with the door ajar and the dish watched constantly. The meringue is soft, not dried, and will weep if it sits long before serving.
- Pudding dishA shallow 1.5- to 2-quart baking dish, wide enough that the meringue covers the surface in a single layer. Deep bowls give you a thick raw-tasting meringue and a cold centre.
- YieldAbout six servings. Best served warm or at room temperature the day it is made; refrigeration makes the meringue slump.
Tapioca, the starch extracted from cassava root, reached American kitchens in the nineteenth century as an imported dried pearl and was prized by household writers as a light, digestible starch fit for invalids and children. Community cookbooks of the era, like this one, are full of tapioca puddings because the ingredient kept indefinitely on a shelf, cost little, and stretched a quart of milk and a few eggs into a company dessert. The meringue lid is a common economical trick of the period: the yolks go into the custard, the whites go on top, and nothing is wasted. "Prepared cocoanut" points to the packaged shredded coconut that had been advertised to American grocers from the 1860s and 1870s onward, turning a laborious tropical luxury into a pantry staple. The attribution to a named contributor is typical of the church-and-society fundraising cookbooks that these receipts were gathered for.