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Tapioca Custard Pudding
4 cups scalded milk 2/3 cup pearl or 1/3 cup minute tapioca 3 eggs 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter Soak tapioca one hour in cold water to cover, drain, add to milk, and cook in double boiler thirty minutes; beat eggs slightly, add sugar and salt, pour on gradually hot mixture, turn into buttered pudding-dish, add butter, bake thirty minutes in slow oven.
A baked tapioca custard: the starch is cooked first, then bound with eggs and set gently in the oven. Everything hinges on keeping the egg mixture below the point where it curdles.
- Slow ovenBake at 300-325F. Anything hotter and the custard will curdle and weep around the tapioca.
- Use a water bathThe recipe does not call for one, but setting the buttered pudding-dish in a larger pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides guards the custard against curdling. The pudding is done when the center still trembles slightly.
- Tempering the eggs"Pour on gradually hot mixture" means add the hot milk and tapioca to the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking. Dumping it in at once scrambles them.
- Pearl vs. minute tapiocaThe hour-long soak and thirty-minute double-boiler cook apply to old-style pearl tapioca. Quick-cooking (minute) tapioca needs no soak and thickens in about five to ten minutes in the hot milk; treat the long timings as belonging to the pearl version only.
- SaltA full teaspoon in a sweet pudding tastes markedly salty by current standards; a quarter to a half teaspoon is closer to modern expectations.
- Double boilerA heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water does the same job. Direct heat scorches milk and starch quickly.
- The butterDotting the tablespoon of butter over the surface before baking gives a lightly browned top; it is not a thickener and can be halved without harm.
- YieldFour cups of milk fills a 2-quart dish and serves six to eight. Serve warm, plain or with cream.
Tapioca, the washed starch of the cassava root, reached North American kitchens in quantity through the nineteenth-century tropical trade and became a fixture of household cookery because it was cheap, kept indefinitely in the pantry, and stretched milk and eggs into a filling dessert. The hard opaque pearls needed long soaking and slow cooking to swell and clear, which is why recipes of this era open with an hour in cold water; the pre-gelatinized "minute" or quick-cooking granules, sold from the late 1800s onward, collapsed that work into a few minutes and are the reason this recipe offers two quantities for the same ingredient. Puddings of this type sat in the invalid-and-nursery end of the repertoire as well as the family table, since a gently baked milk custard was considered among the most digestible sweets a cook could produce.