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Raspberry Tapioca Pudding
Put ¾ cup tapioca into a kettle, cover with 4 cups boiling water and cook until transparent. Stir into this 1 pint of fresh berries, adding sugar to taste. Pour into a mould. Serve cold with cream.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know what tapioca looks like when it is done. Two details carry the dish: the kind of tapioca you buy, and the fact that the berries go in off the heat.
- Which tapiocaThis most likely meant pearl tapioca, small or medium, which needs soaking an hour or more in cold water before cooking, though granulated quick-cooking tapioca was also on the market by this date. Modern quick-cooking ("minute") tapioca behaves quite differently and will thicken in about five minutes with far less water; if you use it, follow the box for liquid. Large pearls of the boba type are not a substitute here.
- KettleA saucepan on the stovetop, not a tea kettle. Use a heavy one and stir, as tapioca settles and scorches on a thin base.
- "Until transparent"This is the only doneness cue given and it is a good one. Soaked small pearls take roughly 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer; the grains lose their white opaque centres entirely and the liquid thickens to a loose gel. A chalky dot in the middle means it needs longer, and no amount of chilling will fix it.
- Berries go in off the heatBerries off the heat -- The recipe does not say when to pull the pan, but stir the raspberries into the cooked tapioca after taking it from the burner. Cooking them down turns the pudding a uniform dull pink and destroys the fruit; folded in warm, they soften just enough and keep their shape.
- A pint of berriesA dry pint is about 2 cups, or 12 ounces. Frozen raspberries work if drained; they release more juice, so expect a slacker set.
- Sugar to tasteFor this quantity, start with 1/2 cup and add more once the berries are in and you can taste the acidity. Raspberries in season need less than supermarket berries in February.
- The mouldRinse the mould with cold water before filling so the pudding turns out cleanly, and chill at least 4 hours or overnight. Tapioca sets firmly enough to unmould only if the mixture was cooked thick to begin with; a wetter batch is better served in glasses.
- YieldFour to six servings. "Cream" here means unsweetened pouring cream, not whipped.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, was by the late nineteenth century a cheap pantry staple in North American kitchens, sold as flake, pearl or granulated. Cookbooks of the period leaned on it heavily because it thickened without eggs and without a flour taste, which mattered in households where eggs were seasonal and expensive. Its appearance in a milling company's promotional book is slightly incongruous, since no flour is involved, but the Five Roses collection was assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives and reflects what was actually in their cupboards. Placing it under "Boiled Puddings" is a bit of a stretch by modern lights, though the logic holds: the pudding is cooked in liquid on the stove rather than baked, then set in a mould in the way a cook would treat any moulded sweet.