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Apple Tapioca (Grated yellow rind of lemon)
Grated yellow rind of 1/4 lemon 3/4 quart pared, quartered, and cored apples 2 teaspoons lemon juice 1/2 cup and 2 teaspoons sugar 1/3 cup tapioca 2 cups water A few grains salt Soak the tapioca in the water one hour or overnight. Put it into a double boiler, with the salt and the two teaspoons sugar, to cook. Stir it frequently and allow it to cook till transparent. This may require two hours, unless minute tapioca is used. While the tapioca is cooking, put the prepared apples into the pan in which the pudding is to be made, sprinkle over them the lemon juice, lemon rind, and one-half cup sugar, and put them into the oven to bake slowly. By the time the tapioca is done, they should be beginning to turn pink. Then pour the tapioca over the apples, and allow the whole to bake long enough for the tapioca and apples to boil up together.
A turn-of-the-century baked tapioca pudding that assumes unprocessed pearl tapioca and a slow oven. The two components are cooked separately and married only at the end.
- The tapioca is the hingePearl tapioca must be soaked and then cooked over water until every grain is clear, with no white center. Undercooked grains stay chalky, and the acid from the apples is unlikely to help them soften much further.
- Minute tapioca changes the timingThe two-hour double-boiler cook applies to old-style pearl tapioca. Quick-cooking (minute) tapioca thickens in about 5 minutes of gentle cooking and needs no overnight soak; use roughly the same 1/3 cup but expect a smoother, less beady result.
- Quantity of applesThree-quarters of a quart of pared, quartered apples is about 3 cups, which comes from roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb whole fruit, or three or four medium apples. A firm baking apple holds its quarters; a soft one will collapse into sauce, which is not fatal but changes the dish.
- Slow ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "bake slowly" would correspond to something like 300-325F in a modern oven. The apples are meant to soften and take color over the better part of an hour, not to steam quickly.
- Sugar split two waysThe 2 teaspoons go into the tapioca to season it from within; the 1/2 cup sweetens the fruit. Keep them separate rather than combining, or the tapioca will be bland against very sweet apples.
- Final bakeThe recipe asks only that the whole boil up together after the tapioca is poured over; a short spell at the same slow heat, perhaps 15-20 minutes, should be enough to see it bubble at the edges. Longer only dries the surface.
- Yield and servingProbably serves four to six. Puddings of this kind were usually eaten warm with cream or a thin custard sauce, and it thickens considerably as it cools.
Tapioca, the starch washed out of cassava root, reached American kitchens through the West Indies trade and by the mid-nineteenth century was a pantry staple in the form of hard white pearls that demanded long soaking and slow cooking. Cookbooks of this period lean on it heavily because it thickens without eggs or flour and suits invalid and children's cookery, which is the frame of reference for much of the domestic-science writing of the era. Pairing it with baked apples and lemon rind is a thrift dish in the New England mold: cheap fruit, a spoonful of starch, and a long, unattended oven. The passing reference to "minute tapioca" suggests a date after granulated quick-cooking tapioca had come on the market in the 1890s and begun displacing the pearl form.