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Baked Custard
Soak Larkin Pearl Tapioca in one cup of milk for several hours. Scald the remainder of one quart of milk, and add moistened Tapioca. Cook twenty minutes; add one tablespoon of butter, a pinch of Larkin Table Salt and one egg beaten light with one-half cup of sugar. Bake half an hour. Serve with custard sauce or with cream, flavored with Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract or Larkin Nutmeg.
Despite the title, this is a baked pearl tapioca pudding rather than a true custard — the egg is barely more than a binder. The original omits an oven temperature, so a few numbers need supplying.
- Pearl tapioca, not instantPearl tapioca must be hydrated before cooking, so the long soak in a cup of milk is not optional. Instant or minute tapioca will not work here — it dissolves to paste. If you can only find large pearls, soak them overnight.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; a moderate oven is implied. Bake at 325–350°F. Higher than that and the single egg curdles into threads before the pudding sets.
- Use a water bathSet the dish in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides. With this little egg the pudding sets by thickened starch as much as by coagulation, and gentle heat keeps the edges from weeping.
- Doneness rather than the clockHalf an hour is about right for a shallow 1½-quart dish, but a deep dish will want 45 minutes or more. It is done when the center is just barely wobbly and an instant-read thermometer shows about 175°F.
- The twenty-minute stovetop stageCook the milk and tapioca over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring often — pearl tapioca sinks and scorches. The pearls should be translucent with no white center left before the egg goes in.
- Temper the eggThe instruction reads as though the beaten egg and sugar go straight into hot tapioca. Whisk a ladleful of the hot mixture into the egg first, then return it all to the pan, or you will get cooked egg specks.
- Larkin brand namesThe company's own products are advertised throughout the book. Read them as pearl tapioca, table salt, vanilla extract and grated nutmeg.
- YieldOne quart of milk in all — the soaking cup is taken from it, not added to it — makes roughly six servings. Custard sauce means a thin stirred crème anglaise; plain cream is the easier option the recipe already allows.
Good Things to Eat belongs to a genre that flourished around 1900: the premium cookbook, given away or sold cheaply by a manufacturer whose products appear in every recipe. The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, built an enormous mail-order soap and grocery business on exactly this model, and the branded ingredients written into the instructions here — Larkin tapioca, salt, vanilla, nutmeg — are the point of the book as much as the cooking is. Pearl tapioca itself, milled from cassava root and imported through Southeast Asian and Brazilian trade, was a fixture of American nursery and invalid cookery in this period because it was cheap, bland and thought easy to digest. The title "Baked Custard" for what is plainly a tapioca pudding reflects a looser nineteenth-century use of "custard" for almost any sweetened baked milk dish.