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Tapioca Cream
Soak 1 cup tapioca over night in 2 cups milk, then add 4 cups milk. Boil till clear, then add salt, yolks of 4 eggs, 1 cup sugar, vanilla flavour to taste. Bake in oven. When done, spread whites of eggs beaten stiff with ½ cup sugar on top and brown.
A standard baked tapioca custard from the era when tapioca came as hard pearls that needed an overnight soak. The proportions assume that pearl; modern quick-cooking tapioca behaves very differently.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThis recipe is written for large or small pearl tapioca, which swells enormously and only turns translucent after long cooking. Minute or instant tapioca is pre-gelatinized and would thicken to paste in minutes, well before the 6 cups of milk had a chance to be absorbed.
- Quantity is generousOne cup of dry pearl tapioca with 6 cups of milk yields a large, firm pudding — roughly 8 to 10 servings in a 2 to 2.5 quart baking dish. Halve it for a family of four.
- "Boil till clear" means the stovetop stageCook the soaked tapioca and the added milk in a double boiler or a heavy pan over low heat, stirring, until every pearl loses its white opaque center. Direct high heat scorches milk and starch, and undercooked pearls stay gritty no matter how long the pudding bakes.
- Temper the yolksThe tapioca mixture is near boiling when the yolks go in. Beat the yolks with the sugar, stir a ladleful of the hot tapioca into them, then return the whole to the pan off the heat, or you will get threads of scrambled egg.
- Oven temperatureThe original says only "Bake in oven" and gives no temperature or time. A moderate oven, around 325F for 30 to 40 minutes, until set at the edges and barely trembling at the center, suits a custard of this kind. A water bath is not essential given the starch, but it helps prevent curdling.
- The meringueFour whites with 1/2 cup sugar makes a soft meringue. Beat to stiff peaks, spread to the very edge of the dish to seal it, and brown at 400F for 6 to 8 minutes or under a broiler for 1 to 2 minutes, watching it continuously.
- SaltThe original gives no amount. Use about 1/2 teaspoon for the full quantity; milk puddings taste flat without it.
Tapioca is starch from the cassava root, sold in North American groceries by the mid-nineteenth century as hard white pearls that had to be soaked for hours or overnight before use. Baked tapioca cream, essentially a starch-thickened custard finished with a meringue, was one of the cheap nursery-and-invalid puddings of the late nineteenth century. Its appearance in a milling company's promotional cookbook like Five Roses is telling: the book collected recipes sent in by ordinary housekeepers across Canada, and puddings of this type were the everyday sweet in kitchens where fruit was seasonal and cream was dear. Quick-cooking tapioca, which made the overnight soak unnecessary, was on the market from the 1890s and gradually displaced the pearl form in home cooking.