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Tapioca Cream
Three tablespoonfuls tapioca, one quart milk, three eggs, one cupful sugar. Flavor with lemon or vanilla.
Soak the tapioca, in a little water, overnight. After rinsing, put it in milk and let it cook soft. Add sugar and yolks of eggs. Whip the whites stiff and pour on the tapioca, as you remove it from the fire. It should be cooked in a tin pail, set in a kettle of boiling water, to prevent the milk from scorching. Eat cold.--Mrs. G. W. P.
A plain boiled custard thickened with tapioca, from the era when the double boiler was improvised out of a tin pail. Two things decide whether it succeeds: the kind of tapioca you buy, and keeping the custard below a simmer once the yolks go in.
- Which tapiocaThe overnight soak and rinse tell you this is small pearl tapioca, not the instant granules sold today. Three tablespoons of pearl tapioca in a quart of milk gives a loose, spoonable cream; if you substitute quick-cooking tapioca, skip the soak and go by the quantity on the package, since granules swell and thicken on a different schedule from pearls.
- The tin pailA tin pail standing in a kettle of boiling water is a double boiler. Use a heatproof bowl or a metal insert over an inch or two of simmering water, and do not let the bottom touch the water.
- Cooking the tapiocaOver the water bath the pearls need roughly 30 to 45 minutes to go from opaque to clear and tender. Stir often, especially in the first ten minutes, or they will clump on the bottom.
- The yolk stageTemper the yolks with a ladle of the hot milk before adding them, then cook only until the custard coats a spoon, around 175-180F. Above that it curdles, and once curdled it cannot be brought back.
- The whitesWhip them to stiff peaks and fold them into the tapioca the moment it comes off the heat, while it is still near 180F, so the residual heat sets them. The mixture must be genuinely hot for this to work; if you are serving anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs, since folded-in whites never reach a fully cooked temperature.
- Sugar and flavoringA full cup for a quart of milk is sweet by current taste; three-quarters of a cup is closer to modern dessert custards. Add vanilla, or lemon zest and juice, after the pan leaves the heat, since both lose aroma when held hot and lemon juice can encourage curdling.
- Chilling and yieldPour into a serving bowl or cups, press plastic wrap on the surface to stop a skin forming, and chill at least three hours. The quart of milk makes about six servings, and the pudding thickens noticeably as it cools, so pull it while it still looks slightly thin.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese and Spanish traders into Africa and Asia, and shipped to nineteenth-century American grocers as dried pearls that kept well on a shelf. That keeping quality is why it turns up so often in household books of the 1870s and 1880s: like rice, sago and cornstarch, it let a cook stretch milk and eggs into a dessert without fresh fruit or a hot oven. Tapioca cream in particular became a fixture of American home cookery, close kin to the boiled custards and blancmanges printed alongside it. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered contributions from many Virginia households, and a recipe of this kind is often associated with that volume; the initialed attribution here -- Mrs. G. W. P. -- is the sort of credit such collections tended to give, a reminder that these were working recipes passed between kitchens rather than the work of a single author.