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Danish Pudding
1 tablespoon lemon juice cup sugar 1 tumbler currant jelly Soak tapioca in water several hours, and cook in same water until transparent. Add remaining ingredients.
Mold, chill, and serve.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the tapioca quantity and the water are missing, and the sugar is given only as "cup." What survives is enough to show the method, which is a jelly-sweetened tapioca mold.
- Missing quantitiesAs printed, the amount of tapioca and its soaking water are absent, and the sugar measure lost its number. Comparable tapioca molds of the period run about 1/2 cup pearl tapioca to 2 cups water with 1/2 cup sugar, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- A tumbler of jellyJelly was commonly put up in straight-sided glass tumblers of roughly 8 fluid ounces, so read this as about 1 cup of currant jelly. Modern jars are usually labelled by weight (10-12 oz), which works out to roughly a cup or a little more.
- Pearl tapioca, not instantThe long soak and cooking "until transparent" only make sense for pearl or flake tapioca, which is what a recipe of this date would normally have meant, though quick-cooking tapioca was already sold by then. Quick-cooking or instant tapioca skips the soak entirely and will turn to paste if treated this way.
- The hinge: cook until clearEvery grain should lose its white center before the jelly goes in. Sugar and acid slow starch from hydrating, so tapioca added to a sweetened, acidic liquid is slow to soften and tends to stay chalky.
- Stir the jelly in off the heatCurrant jelly is set with its own pectin; boiling it after it joins the tapioca thins the body and dulls the fruit. Take the pan off the burner, then beat the jelly and lemon juice through until smooth.
- Molding and chillingRinse the mold in cold water before filling so the pudding releases cleanly, and chill it thoroughly for several hours before turning out — tapioca sets by cooling, not by gelatin, and a warm mold collapses when turned out.
- ServingThe book gives no yield and names no accompaniment; molds of this kind were often served with plain or lightly sweetened cream, which would offset a mixture that is both tart and sweet.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and alongside its house specialties it carries a full complement of general recipes — hence a dessert chapter that includes fruit molds with no chocolate in them at all. The name may allude to the Scandinavian family of cooked fruit puddings, of which Danish rødgrød ("red porridge") is the best known: red currants or other red fruit, sweetened, thickened with starch, chilled, and eaten with cream. Some American cookbooks of the period reached a similar effect by the shortcut visible here, dissolving a tumbler of bought currant jelly into cooked tapioca rather than starting from the fruit. Tapioca itself, made from cassava root and imported through Brazil and the East Indies, had by this date become an inexpensive pantry staple widely used in molded desserts.