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Light Tapioca Custard
Scald 1 pint of milk in a double boiler. Add 2 tablespoonfuls of fine tapioca ; stir very often until thickened then cover and cook until clear and thick. Separate yolks and whites of 3 eggs.
Beat the yolks with 1/2 cupful of sugar and a pinch of salt. Whip the whites to a stiff froth, add the yolks to the tapioca, stir until thickened, then add the whites, turn and mix lightly for three minutes, then take off, flavor to suit and pour into a serving dish to serve cold. According to the season cut fruit may be added to or served with this dish.
A thin, foamy tapioca custard of the sort that stretched a pint of milk and three eggs into four servings. The technique is sound; only the tapioca and the egg handling need translating.
- Fine tapioca is not instant tapioca"Fine" here most likely means small granulated or small pearl tapioca, which generally needs a good stretch of gentle cooking (roughly a quarter of an hour or more) to turn from white specks to clear beads. Modern quick-cooking tapioca thickens in about 5 minutes and can overthicken if given the full old cooking time; small pearl tapioca soaked in the milk first behaves closest to the original.
- Cook until clear, not until thickThe visual cue matters more than the clock. Opaque white centres in the beads mean raw starch and a chalky texture, so keep the double boiler going until every grain is translucent.
- Temper the yolksThe instruction to "add the yolks to the tapioca" will scramble them if done in one pour. Whisk a ladle of the hot tapioca into the sugared yolks first, then return the mixture to the pot.
- Egg temperatureKeep the custard over the double boiler after the yolks go in until it reaches about 170F and coats a spoon. The whites are folded into hot custard and held three minutes, which is brief; if you are serving anyone frail, elderly or pregnant, use pasteurised eggs.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. Direct heat or a hard simmer after the eggs are in curdles the custard and weeps liquid out of the tapioca. The double boiler is doing real work here, not standing in for a saucepan.
- Fold, do not stir"Mix lightly for three minutes" means folding. The whipped whites are the only thing making this "light," and beating them in collapses the whole point of the dish.
- Flavour to suitPeriod choices were vanilla, grated nutmeg, lemon rind or a spoonful of sherry. Add extract off the heat so it does not cook away.
- Serving and yieldAbout four modest servings. Chill at least two hours; press plastic wrap onto the surface or a skin forms. The recipe says only "cut fruit ... according to the season," so any ripe seasonal fruit will do.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, was already familiar in American cookbooks by the nineteenth century and became a fixture of thrift cookery: it cost little, kept indefinitely on the shelf, and let a pint of milk carry a whole dessert course. Books of low-cost recipes leaned on it heavily for exactly that reason, and the trick used here — whipping the whites separately and folding them in at the end — was one common way to give a starch pudding the appearance of something richer, the same logic behind snow puddings and floating islands of the period. The step-by-step instruction to cook "until clear" suggests a cook working with bulk pearls of varying size rather than a boxed product with directions, judging by eye.