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Tapioca Creams
1/2 pint (I cup) milk 2 egg yolks 1 tablespoonful (1/2 oz.) tapioca 3 tablespoonfuls cream 1 tablespoonful (1/2 oz.) sugar 1/4 teaspoonful almond extract A little red currant jelly Soak the tapioca in the milk for one hour, then stir over the fire till the tapioca is quite clear, beat up the yolks with the sugar, add to the mixture with the extract, and stir until well mixed. Add the cream.
A single-serving stirred custard thickened with tapioca, from the invalid-cookery chapter — small quantities, bland flavour, easy to eat. Two things need attention: the egg yolks, and the printer's arithmetic.
- Finish the custard on the heatAs written the yolks go into the hot tapioca and are only "stirred until well mixed," which will not reliably take them past 170F. Keep the pan over low heat and stir until the mixture coats the spoon, roughly 175F, then take it off at once.
- Reading the figuresThe "I" in "(I cup)" is a typesetting stand-in for the numeral 1. The sugar was checked against the printed page and reads 1 tablespoonful (1/2 oz.), which is about what a tablespoon of sugar weighs.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, not the 8 the parenthetical cup suggests. Either works; 1 cup gives a firmer, more custardy result, 10 oz a looser cream.
- Which tapiocaA tablespoon of dry tapioca soaked in milk for an hour points to small pearl or seed tapioca, not modern instant granules. Instant tapioca will thicken in minutes without soaking and is easy to overcook into paste; pearl tapioca is what makes the grains "quite clear."
- "Stir over the fire"Medium-low, with steady stirring. Milk and tapioca scorch readily on the pan bottom, and the starch needs time to hydrate — expect 10 to 15 minutes before the pearls turn translucent.
- The jellyThe red currant jelly is listed but never mentioned in the method, so it is presumably not stirred in. Put a spoonful in the bottom of each glass or custard cup and pour the warm cream over it, or dot it on top once set — its acidity is the only sharp note in the dish.
- Vessels and yieldThis quantity fills one large or two small custard cups. Chill at least two hours; tapioca continues to thicken as it cools.
- Almond extractA quarter teaspoon of modern extract is assertive against a cup of milk. Add it off the heat, after the custard has thickened, or the aroma cooks away.
Invalid cookery was a standing chapter in English and American household manuals well into the 1920s, on the assumption that convalescents needed food that was soft, mild, small in quantity and faintly sweet — beef tea, gruels, arrowroot, junket, and tapioca creams like this one. Tapioca itself is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried through the tropics by Portuguese trade; it is generally said to have reached British kitchens in the nineteenth century as an imported "farinaceous" thickener sold alongside sago and arrowroot, and was valued precisely because it was thought bland and easily digested. The quarter teaspoonful of almond extract and the spoonful of red currant jelly are the period's concession to the patient's appetite: flavour and colour added to a dish that was meant above all to be gentle.