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Pineapple and Tapioca Pudding
To a half-cup of tapioca, prepared with a quart of milk or water (see Introductory Recipes) allow one pint of diced or grated pineapple, pouring it in when the pudding has partly cooled.
A one-line recipe that assumes you have already read the book's introductory tapioca instructions. The important decisions are all in the timing and the kind of tapioca you buy.
- The hinge: add the fruit off the heatPineapple goes in after the pudding has partly cooled. Its acid can thin a hot starch-thickened pudding, and may curdle a milk base.
- Which tapiocaAt the time this was written "tapioca" would ordinarily have meant small or medium pearl tapioca, soaked in cold water before being cooked gently until the grains are clear. Modern quick-cooking tapioca behaves differently and cooks much faster; instant pudding mix is not a substitute at all.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a cup of tapioca to a quart (4 cups) of milk or water gives a loose, spoonable pudding, not a set one. A pint of pineapple is 2 cups, roughly one small fresh pineapple trimmed, or a 20 oz can drained.
- Fresh pineapple and dairyRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests milk proteins and turns a dairy pudding thin and faintly bitter within a few hours. Use canned or briefly cooked pineapple with a milk base, or make the water version with fresh fruit and eat it the same day.
- Sweetening and seasoningThe original leaves sugar to the introductory recipe. Expect to want 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar for a quart of milk, plus a pinch of salt; canned pineapple in syrup needs less.
- Grated versus dicedGrated pineapple disappears into the pudding and flavours it throughout; diced stays as distinct pieces. Either is faithful to the text, but grated fruit releases more juice and loosens the pudding further.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Chill and serve cold, with cream if you like; it will continue to thicken as it sets.
Tapioca comes from cassava, a South American root, and reached the Victorian and Edwardian table largely as nursery and invalid food -- cheap, bland, easy to digest, and endlessly extendable with milk. Pineapple was the opposite: a luxury of hothouses and long sea voyages for most of the nineteenth century, and a flavouring worth stretching. By the time this book was written, commercial canning in Hawaii and improved steamship traffic had brought pineapple within reach of ordinary households, and recipes like this one -- a plain starch pudding lifted by a pint of fruit -- are exactly what that shift produced. The instruction to add the fruit after cooling is often said to reflect hard-won kitchen experience rather than any understanding of enzymes, though the pineapple enzyme was itself described as early as the 1890s.