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Butterscotch Tapioca
1 T butter 3 C milk (hot) 14 C dark brown sugar 12 t salt Cook all together for fifteen minutes, stirring frequently. Remove from fire, add vanilla, and serve with cream.
1/2 C tapioca Mrs. Vernon Woods. 2 egg yolks Pinch of salt 2 C milk
A stovetop tapioca pudding built on brown sugar and butter rather than eggs. The proportions as printed need interpretation before you begin.
- The fractions"14 C dark brown sugar" and "12 t salt" are almost certainly 1/4 cup and 1/2 teaspoon; no pudding takes twelve teaspoons of salt. A larger measure of sugar is not impossible in a butterscotch pudding, but the printed line gives no warrant for it.
- The tapioca itselfThe ingredient the pudding is named for carries no quantity in the printed list. For three cups of milk, quick-cooking (granulated) tapioca is normally used at about 3 tablespoons; large pearl tapioca needs soaking first and behaves quite differently. Decide which you have before starting.
- "Cook all together"A double boiler or a low flame is the safer course. Milk and brown sugar over direct heat can scorch on the bottom of the pan, and scorched milk flavours the whole dish; the recipe's "stirring frequently" is there for that reason.
- Fifteen minutesLonger than granulated quick tapioca usually needs, so judge by the grains rather than the clock: they should be translucent with no white centre. The pudding will still look thin on the stove and sets as it cools.
- Vanilla off the heatAdding it after removing the pan, as directed, is correct -- vanilla is volatile and boils away. Half a teaspoon to a teaspoon for this quantity.
- ButterOne tablespoon is doing flavour work, not thickening. Stirred in with the vanilla rather than cooked from the start, it reads more clearly as butterscotch.
- YieldThree cups of milk gives roughly six half-cup servings. Serve warm or chilled; the original's pour of cream over the top is worth keeping.
Butterscotch in American cookery of this period rarely meant a boiled candy syrup -- it meant dark brown sugar plus butter, the cheapest possible route to a caramel flavour, and it turns up attached to pies, sauces, cookies and puddings alike in church and community collections from the 1910s onward. Tapioca, milled from cassava root and sold in grocery stores as "minute" or "quick" tapioca after granulated forms became widely available in the early twentieth century, made a filling dessert from pantry staples and a quart of milk. All we have here is a contributor's name beside the dish, and measurements terse enough that the recipe was clearly written for women who already knew what a tapioca pudding was supposed to look like.