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Tapioca Pudding
4 tablespoonfuls of tapioca. 1 quart of milk. The yolks of 4 eggs. Whites of 2 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of sugar.
Soak the tapioca over night or several hours in a little water, boil the milk and turn over the tapioca and when it is blood-warm, add the sugar and the eggs well beaten, flavor the pudding with lemon or rose water. Bake it about an hour. After it has cooled a little add the two remaining whites of the eggs and one-half pound of white sugar beaten together for frosting. This serves as sauce for the pudding.--Mrs. A.B.
Tapioca Pudding.
Wash a teacup of tapioca in warm water and let it stand half an hour. Then stir in a custard made of a quart of milk, four eggs, a small piece of butter, and sugar to taste. Bake about an hour and a quarter. Stir two separate times from the bottom, whilst baking.--Mrs. Dr. S.
Tapioca Pudding with Apples.
Soak a cupful of tapioca in three cupfuls of water, four or five hours, where it will be warm, but not cook. Peel and core six apples and stew till tender. Put them in a pudding-dish, filling the holes (from which the cores were extracted) with sugar and nutmeg or grated lemon peel. Then pour over them the soaked tapioca, slightly sweetened and bake three-quarters of an hour. To be eaten cold with sugar and cream.-Mrs. E. W.
Three versions of a baked tapioca custard from three contributors, all written for cooks who knew what a pudding should look like coming out of the oven. The variables worth pinning down are the kind of tapioca, the oven heat, and the sugar.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThese recipes assume small pearl tapioca, which is why they soak for hours. Instant or minute tapioca is pre-gelatinized and will turn to paste if treated this way. Large pearls (boba) are also wrong here astogether; they stay chewy and separate.
- "Blood-warm"Body temperature, roughly 98F. The point is to cool the scalded milk enough that the beaten yolks do not scramble when they go in. If the milk is still steaming, temper it by whisking a little into the eggs first.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake a milk custard at 325 to 350F; hotter and the eggs curdle and weep. A pan of hot water under the dish is the old insurance and still the best.
- The sugar in the first recipeOne tablespoonful of sugar to a quart of milk is nearly unsweetened by modern taste, and deliberately so: the half pound of sugar in the frosting was meant to carry the whole dish. If you skip the frosting, expect to add 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar to the custard.
- The frosting is uncookedTwo raw whites beaten with half a pound of sugar, spread on a pudding that has only cooled a little, never reaches a safe temperature. Use pasteurized whites, or beat the meringue over hot water to 160F, or brown it briefly under a broiler.
- Stirring up from the bottomMrs. Dr. S. is right and the instruction matters: tapioca sinks. Two stirs during the first half of baking distribute the grains, after which the custard should be left to set undisturbed.
- FlavoringRose water is still sold, but modern brands vary widely in strength, so add it cautiously and taste as you go. Lemon here means grated zest or a few drops of oil of lemon, not juice, which would curdle the milk.
- The apple versionA cupful of tapioca to three of water swells into a great deal of pudding; six stewed apples want a 2-quart dish. Soaking somewhere "warm but not cooking" means a low oven with the door ajar or a warm spot on the stove - warm to the hand, but well short of a simmer.
- YieldThe first two versions each use a quart of milk and serve six to eight; the apple version uses water rather than milk (cream is added at the table) and serves about the same.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from recipes sent in by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, prints dishes in clusters like this one, each signed with initials, so that a reader could choose among neighbors' methods. Tapioca is starch extracted from the cassava root, a South American plant carried by Portuguese and Spanish traders into Africa and Asia; it was sold by American grocers as small dried pearls well before this book appeared, and was valued for the reason these three cooks use it, as a thickener that stretched eggs and milk into a substantial pudding without flour or suet. It may be that eggs and cream came easily on a farm while refined sugar was bought and counted, which would account for the odd economy of Mrs. A.B.'s recipe: a tablespoonful of sugar in the pudding, half a pound in the icing that doubles as its sauce.