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Tapioca Cocoanut Pudding
To a Take one-half cup of grated cocoanut with one-half cup of pearl tapioca in cold water to cover. Add one and one-half pints (three cups) of milk, three beaten eggs, one-half cup of sugar and a speck of salt. Mix well and bake in a buttered dish for thirty minutes. Serve hot with cream.
A baked tapioca custard with almost no instruction attached — the original omits the oven temperature, the soaking time and the yield. Two of those matter a great deal.
- Soak the tapioca first, and long"In cold water to cover" implies a soak, but no duration is given. Old-style pearl tapioca needs several hours, and overnight is safer; drained, half-soaked pearls will stay gritty at the centre through a 30-minute bake. Quick-cooking or minute tapioca is a different product and will dissolve into paste here.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no oven temperature or oven term at all. For an egg-and-milk custard, 325F is the safer choice; pushed much hotter, the eggs curdle and weep.
- Set it in a water bathThree cups of milk to three eggs is a soft custard ratio. The original does not call for one, but standing the buttered dish in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the side gives a gentler, more even set and guards against tough edges.
- Thirty minutes is optimisticThree cups of milk in a single deep dish will likely need appreciably longer than the stated half hour to reach the point where a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean and the centre still trembles. Thirty minutes would suit only a shallow dish.
- "Cocoanut"The period spelling of coconut, and here it means fresh coconut grated from the shell — unsweetened, moist, fairly coarse. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is the nearest substitute; sweetened flaked coconut will make the pudding cloying against the half cup of sugar already in it.
- A speck of saltAn indefinite period measure, less than a pinch; an eighth of a teaspoon or less. In a custard this quiet it is doing real work on the milk and coconut, so do not skip it.
- Yield and servingAbout six servings in a 1.5-quart dish. "Serve hot with cream" means plain pouring cream, unwhipped and unsweetened; the pudding also eats well warm rather than straight from the oven.
Tapioca reached American kitchens as an imported starch extracted from cassava root, and by the late nineteenth century it had settled into the same domestic niche as sago and rice — a cheap thickener that turned milk and a few eggs into a filling hot pudding. Grated coconut belongs to the same trade routes. The recipe's terseness assumed a reader who already knew what a moderate oven felt like and how long her own tapioca took to soften. The garbled opening words, "To a Take," are a printer's slip preserved here as it stands.