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Tapioca Cream
3 tablespoons pearl tapioca cup sugar 2 cups milk 1 teaspoon salt 2 egg whites 2 egg yolks ½ teaspoon vanilla Soak the tapioca in milk one hour, cook in double boiler one half hour. Mix egg yolks, salt and sugar; add tapioca mixture, and cook until mixture thickens. Cool slightly, add stiffly beaten whites. Cool, flavor, and serve.
A plain boiled custard thickened with tapioca, of the sort that turned up on American supper tables weekly. Two of the quantities as printed need judgment before you start.
- The sugar quantity is brokenThe line reads "cup sugar" with the fraction dropped in printing. For 2 cups of milk and 2 yolks, something in the range of 1/4 to 1/2 cup fits; 1/3 cup is a safe reading, 1/4 if you want it barely sweet.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintA teaspoon of salt in 2 cups of milk is aggressively salty. Comparable period recipes call for a saltspoon or a few grains -- on the order of 1/4 teaspoon -- which is probably what was intended here.
- Pearl tapioca, not instantPearl tapioca is the small opaque bead that must be hydrated before cooking; the hour-long soak in the milk is not optional and cannot be shortened. Modern "minute" or quick-cooking tapioca is pre-gelatinized granules and behaves completely differently here.
- Double boiler for a reasonMilk and tapioca over direct heat will scorch before the beads go clear, and the custard stage that follows will curdle over direct heat as well. Keep the water below a boil and stir; a half hour is about right, and the beads should be translucent with no white center.
- Where it thickensAfter the yolks go in, the custard sets between about 170F and 180F and will scramble above 185F. Pull it when it coats the spoon; the tapioca goes on thickening as it cools.
- The beaten whitesThe whites are folded in raw and never cooked; the residual warmth of the custard does not pasteurize them. Use pasteurized whites if that matters in your household, and fold gently so the foam survives.
- Flavor lastVanilla goes in after cooling, as directed. Added hot, much of the aroma steams off.
- YieldFour small servings. Serve barely warm or chilled; press plastic wrap onto the surface if you refrigerate it, or it skins over.
Tapioca is the starch washed from the root of cassava, shipped to nineteenth-century American and European kitchens in dried pearls from Brazil and the East Indies, and it arrived in cookbooks as one of a family of invalid and nursery puddings alongside sago, arrowroot and rice. Its reputation was for being cheap, bland and easy to digest, and tapioca cream is a common fixture of general household manuals of the period, often in something like this form: soaked pearls, a stirred custard base, and whipped whites folded in at the end to lighten it. The lightening with whites is usually what distinguishes the "cream" from a plain tapioca pudding, though the two names were not applied consistently.