Apple Tapioca Pudding

A late-Victorian baked pudding that depends on two things: soaking the tapioca properly and choosing apples that hold their shape. Both are easy to get wrong with modern ingredients.

• Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe recipe assumes small pearl tapioca, which needs the full hour of soaking to soften and swell. Instant or minute tapioca will turn to paste and quick-cooking granules will not give the clear, jellied set the dish is built on.
• The measurementsHalf a pint of tapioca is 1 cup dry; 1 quart of water is 4 cups. That ratio looks generous but the pearls absorb nearly all of it during soaking and baking.
• Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for 50 to 60 minutes suits it. The tapioca should be translucent throughout with no white centres, and the apples should yield to a skewer.
• Choosing applesWhole pared apples need a firm cooking variety that will not collapse into sauce. Braeburn, Golden Delicious or Northern Spy hold up; Macintosh and most soft eating apples will not.
• The lemon peelUse pared zest with no white pith, a strip in each apple cavity. The "flavor with lemon" in the tapioca means juice, zest or both, roughly one lemon's worth for a quart of liquid. Note that the recipe itself adds no sugar to the pudding; sugar comes with the cream at the table.
• Salt"A little salt" is about half a teaspoon for this quantity. Without it the tapioca tastes flat and starchy.
• Cover it earlyThe recipe gives no instruction here, but left uncovered the exposed tapioca can skin over and colour before the apples are cooked through. Covering for the first part of the bake and uncovering to finish is a reasonable precaution.
• Yield and servingThe recipe fixes no dish size or number of apples, only 'enough apples to fill dish'; a quart of liquid plus six medium apples needs something larger than a 2-quart dish. The pudding sets further as it cools, and it is served cold, with the cream poured at the table rather than baked in.