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Indian Tapioca
Into a pint of scalded milk stir one-third of a cup of Larkin Pearl Tapioca that has been soaked for three hours in water, and two tablespoons of Indian meal.
A two-line recipe that assumes the cook already knows what a milk pudding is. The instructions stop before the cooking does, so the main work is filling in what the original took for granted.
- The recipe is incomplete as printedThere is no sweetening, no salt, no flavouring and no cooking time. Read it as the base for a baked milk pudding: sugar to taste, a pinch of salt, perhaps an egg or a little butter. None of this is in the printed text, and the amounts are a modern guess.
- Indian mealNineteenth-century shorthand for cornmeal, ground from maize rather than the imported wheat or oats. Fine or medium yellow cornmeal is the closest match; stone-ground gives the slightly gritty texture the dish is meant to have.
- Pearl tapioca, not instantThe three-hour soak is not optional with true pearl tapioca. Modern instant or minute tapioca is pre-cooked and will turn to paste under the same treatment; if that is what you have, skip the soak and shorten the cooking sharply.
- Scalded milkHeat to about 180F, when a rim of small bubbles forms at the edge, not a rolling boil. Scalding may have served partly as a keeping-quality measure in the days before reliable pasteurisation, and partly to bring the milk to the starch hot.
- CookingThe original stops before any cooking direction is given. A pint of milk with this much starch wants long, gentle heat: a covered dish in a slow oven, or a double boiler over simmering water until the pearls are clear through with no white centre. Any temperature or timing is a modern reconstruction, not the book's.
- Why it thickens lateBoth the tapioca and the cornmeal set as they cool. A mixture that looks alarmingly thin coming out of the oven will be right at the table; over-thickening while hot gives a stiff, pasty pudding.
- YieldA pint of milk makes about four small servings. Serve warm with cream, or cold with a spoonful of molasses or maple syrup; molasses is the sweetening associated with Indian pudding, though the recipe says nothing about serving.
The dish looks like a crossbreed of two older puddings, though that genealogy is inference from the ingredient list rather than established fact. Indian pudding, a New England staple by the eighteenth century, is cornmeal cooked slowly in milk with molasses; tapioca pudding is generally reckoned the later arrival, spreading as cassava starch from Brazil and the East Indies became a cheap grocery item, though tapioca puddings appear in English and American cookery books well before 1850. Combining them gave the cornmeal's flavour with the softer, more gelatinous body of tapioca. The naming of a brand in the ingredient line is the giveaway about this book's purpose: cookbooks issued by grocery and mail-order houses circulated widely in this period, given away or sold cheaply, and their recipes doubled as advertising for the pantry goods the company sold. The instructions are terse because the audience was assumed to know how a milk pudding behaved and needed telling only which tapioca to buy.