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Pineapple Tapioca Pudding
¾ 3/4 cup tapioca soaked over night in plenty of water. In the morning, drain off the water and add 1 can of pineapple (with syrup) and the juice of 1 lemon, also 1½ cups sugar and salt to taste. Steam until clear (about 2 hours). Then add beaten whites of 3 eggs while hot. Set out until very cold. Serve with whipped or plain cream sweetened to taste.
A steamed tapioca pudding of the era when canned pineapple was still a small luxury. Two things decide whether it works: the kind of tapioca you buy, and how you handle the egg whites.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe overnight soak only makes sense for whole pearl tapioca, which is what the book assumes. Instant or minute tapioca is pre-cooked and ground; it will dissolve to paste long before two hours are up. Large pearls need the full soak and the full steaming to go from opaque white to clear.
- Steam, don't bakeThe recipe says steam: the bowl goes covered over simmering water — a double boiler or a basin on a rack in a lidded pot, water kept at a bare simmer and topped up as it evaporates. Direct heat will scorch the sugar-heavy mixture on the bottom.
- "Until clear" is the real testTwo hours is an estimate. Judge by the pearls: they are done when there is no chalky white centre left and the whole mass is translucent. Undercooked tapioca stays gritty no matter how long it chills.
- One can of pineappleIn this period that most likely meant a can holding roughly 2½ cups of fruit and syrup, in the range later standardized as a No. 2 can. A modern 20 oz can of crushed pineapple in juice is the nearest equivalent. Sliced pineapple should be chopped small first.
- The sugarA cup and a half is on top of the canned syrup, which was heavier then than the light juice packs sold now. With juice-packed fruit, a cup is closer to modern palates; taste the mixture before it sets, since chilling mutes sweetness.
- The egg whitesBeaten whites folded into the boiling-hot pudding are only partly cooked by the residual heat, and the pudding is then chilled rather than reheated. If that matters in your household, use pasteurized whites. Fold them in quickly while the tapioca is at its hottest, straight off the steam.
- Chilling is part of the recipe"Set out until very cold" means several hours, ideally overnight. The pudding is loose and slack when warm and only sets to a spoonable, faintly foamy consistency once thoroughly chilled.
- YieldRoughly six to eight servings. It keeps two days covered in the refrigerator, though the whipped whites deflate a little after the first day.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese and Spanish traders to Africa and Asia, and it reached North American kitchens in the nineteenth century as an imported pantry staple sold in coarse pearls that had to be soaked before use. By the time the Five Roses Cook Book was assembled from Canadian housewives' contributions for the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, canned pineapple had become cheap and reliable enough — the Hawaiian canneries were expanding fast in the first decade of the century — that a tropical fruit could turn up in an ordinary steamed pudding on a prairie farm. The combination is characteristic of the period: a long-keeping dry good from one hemisphere, a tin from another, and a technique, steaming in a covered basin, inherited from British boiled puddings and well suited to a stove already lit for something else.