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Tapioca Cream
Soften three tablespoons of Larkin Pearl Tapioca in water over night. Add to one quart of scalded milk and cook until Tapioca is clear; stir in the yolks of three eggs beaten light with three-fourths of a cup of sugar. Cook two or three minutes, add Larkin Table Salt and flavor with one-half teaspoon of Larkin Orange Flavoring Extract. Pour into a deep dish, and cover with a meringue made from the whites of the eggs beaten stiff with one-half cup of powdered sugar. Brown in a slow oven and serve cold.
A stirred custard thickened with pearl tapioca, given a soft meringue lid. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: the tapioca needs long, slow cooking to go clear, and the yolks must not be allowed to scramble.
- Pearl tapioca, not instantLarkin Pearl Tapioca was a pearl tapioca, which is why it wants an overnight soak in cold water. Instant or quick-cooking tapioca is pre-gelatinised and needs no soaking; if you substitute it, follow the package proportions and skip straight to the milk, or the pudding will be gluey.
- The Larkin namesLarkin Table Salt and Larkin Orange Flavoring Extract are simply salt and orange extract from the company's own line. Use a scant quarter teaspoon of salt, which the original leaves unstated, and any orange extract.
- Cook the tapioca gentlyA quart of scalded milk over direct heat will catch and scorch during the time the soaked pearls need to turn translucent, which can run to half an hour. Use a double boiler or the lowest possible flame with frequent stirring.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks with the sugar, then whisk a ladle of hot tapioca milk into them before returning the lot to the pan. The two or three minutes of further cooking should bring it to about 175F -- thick enough to coat a spoon, no hotter, or it will curdle.
- "A slow oven"300F. Soft meringue on a custard is browned, not baked through; ten to fifteen minutes at that temperature gives colour without weeping. Spread the meringue so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which keeps it from shrinking away as it cools.
- Powdered sugar in the meringueIn this period 'powdered sugar' usually meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar sold now. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match and dissolves readily in the whites.
- ServingChill several hours before serving; the tapioca continues to set as it cools. A quart of milk makes six to eight servings in a deep dish.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, reached American kitchens through the Atlantic trade and by the late nineteenth century was a staple of the nursery-and-invalid end of the dessert repertoire, prized as cheap, bland and easily digested. This version comes from a Larkin publication: the Larkin Company of Buffalo began as a soap manufacturer and built an enormous mail-order business on the premium system, in which customers who bought soap by the box received housewares, furniture and groceries as bonuses. Cookbooks like this one were promotional literature, and the insistence on Larkin Pearl Tapioca, Larkin Table Salt and Larkin Orange Flavoring Extract in a single short recipe is the point of the exercise rather than a matter of technique. The dish itself is a plain boiled custard with a meringue top -- what an earlier generation would have recognised as a tapioca version of the many "floating" and meringued puddings that let a cook use both halves of the egg.