Home › Hot Puddings › Newton Tapioca
Newton Tapioca
5 tablespoons pearl tapioca 4 cups scalded milk 4 tablespoons Indian meal 3/4 cup molasses 3 tablespoons butter 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 cup milk Soak tapioca two hours in cold water to cover. Pour scalded milk over Indian meal and cook in double boiler ten minutes. Add tapioca drained from water, molasses, butter and salt; turn into buttered pudding-dish, and pour over remaining milk, but do not stir. Bake one and one-fourth hours in a moderate oven.
A New England Indian pudding with pearl tapioca standing in for part of the cornmeal. The instruction that matters is the last one: the final cup of milk goes on top and is left alone, and that undisturbed layer is what gives the pudding its soft, custardy stratum underneath the crust.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, and in a pudding of this period it means a fine or medium yellow meal, not coarse polenta grind and not degerminated instant. Stone-ground fine yellow meal gives the closest texture.
- Pearl tapiocaSmall pearl tapioca, the kind that needs soaking, is what the two-hour soak assumes. Instant or minute tapioca will not work here; it hydrates immediately and turns to paste during the long bake.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 325-350F. At that range the stated hour and a quarter should be about right for a dish of roughly two quarts; the pudding should be set at the edges and still trembling at the centre.
- Do not stirThe cup of cold milk poured over the top sinks slowly and bakes into a separate soft layer. Stirring it in gives you a uniform, denser pudding and loses the point of the dish.
- MolassesUse an unsulphured baking molasses. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter than the ordinary table molasses this recipe assumes and will dominate the corn and dairy flavour.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 2-quart baking dish, deep rather than shallow, so the milk layer has somewhere to sit. Serves six to eight.
- ServingHot puddings of this type were sent to table warm with cream, or with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in later New England practice. It sets further as it cools and reheats well.