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Fruit Tapioca
Cook together equal measure of fruit and water until soft enough to rub through a sieve.
Measure, return to the fire and for each cupful add 1 scant tablespoonful of fine tapioca. Stir frequently until the tapioca swells, then cover and cook until transparent. Add sufficient sugar to sweeten, pour into a serving dish and set aside. Serve icy cold with cream.
A frugal fruit pudding thickened with tapioca rather than eggs or cream. The method is sound; only the tapioca itself needs translating.
- "Fine tapioca" means quick-cookingEarly-twentieth-century "fine" or "granulated" tapioca is closest to modern quick-cooking (minute) tapioca, not pearl tapioca and not boba. Pearl tapioca needs soaking for hours and will stay gritty on this timetable.
- The hinge is constant stirringStirring matters -- Tapioca sinks and welds to the bottom of the pan if left alone. The recipe says to stir frequently until the granules swell, then cover and let them finish to translucency; a scorched bottom will flavour the whole dish.
- ProportionsOne scant tablespoon per cup of purée gives a soft, spoonable set, not a moulded one. More tapioca would set it firmer, but the recipe offers no such variation.
- It thickens on coolingPull it off the heat while it still looks loose. Tapioca sets considerably as it chills, and a mixture that looks right hot will be stiff and gluey cold.
- Fruit choice and sugarApples, plums, rhubarb stalks, apricots and berries all work. Sugar goes in at the end because it slows the swelling of the starch; taste after cooking and sweeten to suit the fruit.
- SievingA food mill or fine sieve gives the smooth purée intended here. A blender works but leaves skins and seed fragments in suspension, which changes the texture.
- Yield and servingServing -- Serve thoroughly chilled, as the recipe directs; pressing plastic wrap onto the surface stops a skin forming. The recipe calls for cream.
Tapioca, the starch extracted from cassava root, reached British and American kitchens as a cheap imported thickener in the nineteenth century, valued because it turned a small quantity of fruit and a great deal of water into a substantial dessert without eggs, butter or much sugar. Cookbooks of the economy genre — pamphlets, settlement-house manuals, extension bulletins — are often said to have made frequent use of it for that reason. The instruction to measure the purée before adding the tapioca, rather than specifying weights of fruit, is characteristic of the period's approach to household cooking, where quantities were commonly adjusted by proportion rather than fixed by recipe.