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Orange Tapioca or Sago
Make a simple, clear tapioca (see Introductory Recipes) sweetened to taste; add whipped white of one egg and pour over sliced oranges.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make the tapioca; the interest lies in what "simple, clear" meant and how the egg white is handled.
- "Clear" tapiocaThis means pearl tapioca cooked in water rather than milk, so it sets translucent and jelly-like. A milk-based tapioca would be called a cream or a pudding and would muddy the effect against the orange slices.
- Proportions, since none are givenA workable clear tapioca is about 1/2 cup small pearl tapioca to 4 cups water, with 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar and a pinch of salt. Soak the pearls an hour or more, then cook gently until no white centres remain.
- Sago is not interchangeable pound for poundSago comes from palm pith and tapioca from cassava root. Sago pearls generally cook faster and set a little softer; start checking well before the tapioca timing.
- Modern pearlsToday's "minute" or instant tapioca is precooked and will not give the whole translucent pearls the recipe wants. Look for small pearl tapioca, not the large boba pearls, which stay chewy rather than setting into the mass.
- The egg whiteWhip it to soft peaks and fold it into the tapioca while the tapioca is still warm, which lightens the set and gives it a foamy body; folded into a cold, stiff mixture it tends to deflate. Anyone cooking for pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised eaters should use pasteurised whites, as the white is never properly cooked here.
- The orangesSlice crosswise and cut away every trace of white pith, or supreme them out of the membrane. Many market oranges of the period were seedy, so seedless navels save some work. Do the slicing over a bowl and add the juice to the tapioca.
- Assembly and chillingArrange the orange in the serving dish and pour the tapioca over. The recipe gives no chilling instruction; chill until set, which will take a few hours, and serve cold.
- YieldThe quantities above serve four to six as a light dessert.
Tapioca and sago puddings ran right through nineteenth-century domestic cookery as invalid food first and dessert second: cheap, bland, easily digested starches that a sick person could keep down, recommended in sickroom manuals alongside arrowroot and gruel. Sago, scraped from the pith of Southeast Asian palms, reached British and American kitchens through the colonial trade; tapioca, made from cassava, largely displaced it over the century. Then there is the orange. Florida and California groves, together with Mediterranean imports, were making oranges steadily more available, and this book gives over a whole section to the fruit -- among the recipes, a dessert whose only job is to hold sliced fruit in a clear, sweet setting.