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Tapioca Cream Soup
One quart of white stock, one pint of cream or milk, one onion, two stalks of celery, one-third cup of tapioca, two cups of cold water, one tablespoon of butter, small piece of mace, salt, pepper. Wash the tapioca and soak. Cook it and the stock together, very gently, for one hour.
Cut the onion and celery into small pieces, and put on to cook for twenty minutes with the milk and mace. Strain on the tapioca and stock. Season, add butter and serve.-B. C. J
A Victorian cream soup thickened with tapioca rather than flour. The method is sound, but two of the quantities need reading between the lines.
- The two cups of cold waterMost likely the soaking water for the tapioca rather than an addition to the soup; the recipe says only "wash the tapioca and soak" and never states whether to drain it. Soaking the pearls for an hour or more and draining before combining with the stock gives a soup of the expected body; tipping the soaking water in as well will thin it.
- Use pearl tapiocaThis calls for small pearl tapioca, which holds its shape and gives the soup its faint texture. Instant or "minute" tapioca is pre-cooked and pre-ground and will dissolve into paste in far less than an hour. Large boba-size pearls are also wrong here.
- White stockA pale, unroasted stock from veal or chicken bones with no browning and no tomato. A good low-sodium chicken stock is the practical substitute; anything dark will muddy the colour, which is half the point of the dish.
- Very gently means very gentlyAn hour of anything more than a bare tremble will scorch the tapioca on the bottom of the pan. Use a heavy saucepan, keep the heat low, and stir every ten minutes or so.
- MaceA "small piece" means a blade of mace, the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold whole in some spice shops. If you only have ground mace, use a scant 1/8 teaspoon and add it with the seasoning at the end rather than steeping it.
- Infusing the milkTwenty minutes with the onion, celery and mace should be at a bare simmer, not a boil, and the pan wants watching. Straining the hot milk onto the tapioca and stock is the whole of the assembly; the vegetables are flavouring only and are discarded.
- Season last, and tasteSalt is left unmeasured because the stock varies. Season only after the milk goes in, since the pint of milk added to the quart of stock increases the volume by about half. White pepper keeps the appearance clean.
- YieldAbout three pints, or six modest first-course servings. It thickens as it stands and will need a little more stock or milk if reheated.
Tapioca, the starch washed from the root of cassava, reached American and British kitchens in quantity in the nineteenth century as an imported colonial product, and cookbooks of the period treat it as a general-purpose thickener rather than strictly a pudding ingredient. Using it in a soup put a delicate body into the liquid without the pastiness of a flour roux, and other period "cream soups" use tapioca, sago or arrowroot in the same way. The recipe's initials, B. C. J., suggest a contributed recipe, a common practice in compiled cook books of the period. The taste for a nearly white, faintly spiced, mace-scented cream soup as the opening course of a formal dinner belongs firmly to that era and largely disappeared with it.