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Maple Tapioca Pudding
Maple tapioca will need 1 cupful of tapioca cooked slowly in 1 pint of hot water until transparent. Add butter the size of an egg, 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, 3/4 of a cupful of thick maple syrup and 3 well-beaten eggs. Pour into a baking dish and bake until set, then put aside until cold. Serve with whipped cream sweetened and flavored with a little vanilla.
A baked tapioca custard sweetened entirely with maple syrup. The original gives no oven temperature and no baking time, so the two things worth knowing are what temperature to use and how to tell when it is set.
- Which tapiocaThe instruction to cook it slowly until transparent points to pearl tapioca, which needs a long slow simmer -- roughly half an hour or more -- in the pint of water before it clears. Quick-cooking (minute) tapioca clears in a few minutes and takes proportionally more liquid, so it cannot be substituted measure-for-measure here.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Older cooks measured fat by eye against a hen's egg.
- Oven temperatureTreat it as a baked custard: 325-350F. Higher heat curdles the eggs and weeps liquid out of the tapioca.
- When it is setRoughly forty to fifty minutes in a dish of about a quart and a half, though the recipe gives no time. The edges should be firm and the centre should still wobble slightly; it finishes setting as it cools. A dish of hot water under it makes the texture smoother but is not essential.
- Cool the tapioca firstLet the cooked tapioca drop below scalding before the beaten eggs go in, or stir a little of the hot mixture into the eggs first. Added straight to boiling tapioca they scramble.
- Maple syrup'Thick maple syrup' most likely means a well-reduced farm syrup, often darker than a modern Grade A amber. Dark or very dark syrup gives the closest flavour.
- ServingEnough for perhaps half a dozen small servings. The recipe does say to put it aside until cold, which matters more than it sounds -- warm it is loose, cold it slices softly and the maple comes forward.
History: Tapioca, the starch washed out of cassava root, reached North American kitchens as a cheap imported thickener and was a fixture of nineteenth-century invalid cookery before it became a family dessert. Its economy is straightforward: a cupful of dry starch, a pint of water and three eggs make a substantial dish, and the only costly item is the maple syrup. Pairing tapioca with maple instead of the usual milk-and-sugar custard may well be a regional economy, though that is a guess rather than something the recipe itself tells us.