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Peach Tapioca
1 can peaches 1/4 cup powdered sugar 1 cup tapioca Boiling water 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt Drain peaches, sprinkle with powdered sugar, and let stand one hour; soak tapioca one hour in cold water to cover; to peach syrup add enough boiling water to make three cups; heat to boiling-point, add tapioca drained from cold water, sugar, and salt; then cook in a double boiler until transparent. Line a mould or pudding-dish with peaches cut in quarters, fill with tapioca, and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes; cool slightly, turn on a dish, and serve with Cream Sauce I.
A straightforward canned-fruit pudding from the era when pearl tapioca was a pantry staple. The one thing that decides success is cooking the tapioca until every grain is clear before it goes near the oven.
- Which tapiocaThis means small pearl tapioca, which needs the full hour of soaking and then a long spell over the double boiler, often an hour or more, to turn from white and opaque to glassy. Quick-cooking (granulated) tapioca cannot be substituted cup for cup; it swells far more and would set into paste.
- Transparent means transparentAny chalky centres left in the pearls will stay gritty through baking, since the oven stage only sets and heats the pudding. Hold it on the double boiler until the mixture is uniformly clear and thick enough to mound on a spoon.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar rather than modern cornstarch-thickened confectioners' sugar. Either works here; its job is to draw a little juice from the drained fruit and firm the slices.
- The can of peachesThe recipe does not say what size can. Whatever you use, make the drained syrup up to three cups total with boiling water and no more, and cut the fruit in quarters as directed to line the mould.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is generally taken as somewhere around 350F. Thirty minutes is enough to set the pudding and warm the fruit through; longer will brown the top and dull the peaches.
- UnmouldingButter the mould before lining it with fruit, and let the pudding stand 10 to 15 minutes off the heat so it firms at the edges. Turned out too hot it slumps, and cold it sticks.
- Cream Sauce IA separate recipe in the same book; follow it as printed there. Any pouring custard or plain cream serves the same purpose.
- YieldAbout six servings.
Tapioca puddings became common in American home cookery once refined pearl tapioca, milled from cassava starch and imported from Brazil and the East Indies, arrived cheaply in grocers' bins in the later nineteenth century. Cooks liked it because it thickened fruit juice without flour or eggs, giving a clear, jelly-like set that showed the fruit off; recipe writers of the period print versions with apple, prune, or, as here, canned peaches. The reliance on a can is itself a period marker: commercially canned California peaches in heavy syrup were widely available around the turn of the century, and their syrup was treated as an ingredient in its own right rather than something to pour away.