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Apple Tapioca
Thoroughly wash one-half cup of Larkin Pearl Tapioca in several waters. Cook in water to cover, in a double boiler, until transparent. Put a layer of apples, pared and quartered, in the bottom of a baking dish, pour the Tapioca over it, and bake in a covered dish until the apples are tender. Remove cover and brown. Serve with cream and sugar.
A plain baked pudding of the kind that turned a half cup of dry starch and a few apples into dessert for a family. Two things need translating: the tapioca itself, and the fact that the recipe never tells you how much sugar, liquid or heat to use.
- Pearl tapioca is not instant tapiocaLarkin Pearl Tapioca was a brand of pearl tapioca, washed and then cooked until the grains turn clear. Modern quick-cooking or "minute" tapioca is pre-gelatinized and cannot be substituted measure for measure here; use pearl tapioca, and expect the washing and slow cooking step to matter.
- Water to cover, and then someHalf a cup of dry pearl tapioca absorbs a great deal of liquid. Expect to need something in the region of two cups of water in the double boiler, adding more as it thickens, until every grain is translucent with no white center. Allow the better part of an hour over simmering water, not ten minutes.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for this: 45 to 60 minutes covered until the apple quarters yield to a knife, then 10 minutes uncovered to take color on top.
- Sugar and salt are assumedThe recipe adds no sweetening at all; the sugar arrives at the table, with the cream. If you want it sweetened in the dish instead, a pinch of salt in the tapioca water and 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar tossed with the apples will do it, plus lemon zest or cinnamon if you like.
- Choose apples that hold their shapeQuartered apples in a covered dish steam rather than roast. A firm tart variety such as Northern Spy, Granny Smith or Braeburn stays in recognizable pieces; softer supermarket apples collapse into sauce under the tapioca.
- Quantity and yieldWith the apples underneath it, this fills something like a 1 1/2-quart baking dish. Figure 4 to 6 apples and four to six modest servings.
- The cream is not optional garnishThe cold cream and sugar poured over at the table are part of the dish as written. Plain pouring cream, unwhipped, is the likely intention.
Pearl tapioca, made from the starch of the cassava root, reached American kitchens through a trade that drew on tropical sources in the Americas and, increasingly by the late nineteenth century, Southeast Asia, and by that date it was a cheap pantry staple sold loose by the pound and by mail. The brand name here is the point of the recipe: the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, built an enormous mail-order business selling soap and groceries direct to households, and issued cookbooks whose recipes conveniently called for Larkin goods by name. Apple tapioca in particular was a standard of turn-of-the-century domestic cookery and cooking-school teaching, praised as economical and easily digested, which in the language of the period meant it was thought suitable for children and invalids. The later rise of quick-cooking tapioca, which came to dominate the twentieth-century pudding shelf, is why recipes calling for the slow-cooked pearl form now read as unfamiliar.