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Tapioca Pudding
One quart of milk, four tablespoons of tapioca, four eggs, one pint of cream, the grated rind of a lemon, a little salt, two wineglasses of wine, sugar to taste. Let the tapioca soak twelve hours in the milk. Put over the fire, and let it just come to a boil, and then stand until quite cool; then add the other ingredients, leaving the cream and beaten whites of the eggs to put in last. Bake in a moderate oven.
The tapioca used is the large, old-fashioned kind. The modern tapioca would not necessarily require to soak over night.
— Miss Anna M. Rossell
A baked tapioca custard, closer to a rich pouring pudding than the stiff nursery version. The recipe already notes the crucial point about tapioca, and the rest turns on treating it as a custard.
- Which tapioca"Large, old-fashioned" means whole pearl tapioca, the big pearls rather than the fine grades, and that is the kind that genuinely wants a long soak. Small pearl or instant granulated tapioca hydrates in minutes; if you use it, soak an hour at most or it goes to paste.
- Four tablespoons is not muchA quart of milk thickened with only four tablespoons of pearl tapioca gives a loose, custard-set pudding with pearls suspended in it, not a spoon-standing one. That is the intended texture.
- WineglassIn American receipts of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, so two wineglasses is roughly half a cup. Sherry or madeira suits it; the alcohol thins the custard slightly, so measure rather than pour.
- Moderate oven350F. A water bath is worth the trouble here given the proportion of liquid to egg: set the dish in a roasting pan and pour in boiling water to halfway up the sides.
- DonenessBake until the edges are set and the centre still trembles, roughly 45 to 60 minutes in a two-quart dish. An instant-read thermometer in the middle should show 170-175F; past 180F the custard weeps and curdles.
- Sugar to tasteNo quantity is given. Half to three-quarters of a cup suits a quart of milk plus a pint of cream, erring on the less sweet side.
- Order of assemblyCool the tapioca-milk properly before the yolks go in or they scramble. Fold in the cream and the beaten whites last and bake at once; the whites lighten the top into a soft crust as it sets.
- YieldAbout three pints of mixture, serving eight to ten. Good warm, better cold the next day.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried into tropical Asia and Africa by Portuguese traders, and by the nineteenth century it reached American kitchens as an imported pantry good in the form of hard pearls that had to be soaked before they would soften. Miss Rossell's aside about "the modern tapioca" catches the moment of changeover: finer, quicker-cooking grades were coming onto the market, and cooks working from older receipts had to be told that the overnight soak was no longer compulsory. The dish itself is a baked custard with the pearls as body, and the pint of cream and two glasses of wine mark it as company food rather than everyday. That it is signed by name is typical of the church and community cookbook, where the contributor's name was part of the recommendation.