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Tapioca and Tomatoes
1 tablespoon tapioca 1 ounce butter 2 medium-sized tomatoes 1 ounce Parmesan 1 ounce bread crumbs Pepper and salt Soak the tapioca for two hours in water, and then put it on to boil; add a little more water if necessary, until it is quite done, and the consistency of porridge. Put the tomatoes in boiling water for a few seconds, when the peel will come off easily. Slice them after they are peeled, and lay them at the bottom of a well-buttered baking dish. Season the tapioca with pepper and salt, and stir in half the butter, and spread it over the tomatoes. Now put in the Parmesan, and sprinkle the bread crumbs over the top. Break up the remainder of the butter in bits, and place it over the bread crumbs. Bake in a hot oven for about twenty minutes. The preparation of this dish will take less time if the Minute Tapioca is used. Follow the directions for cooking which appear on the package and proceed as in the above recipe. Season well.
A small gratin of stewed tapioca over peeled tomatoes, from the era when starch plus cheese counted as a meat substitute. The measurements are by weight and the yield is modest.
- Hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "hot oven" in period usage is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is enough to set the layers and brown the crumbs; the tapioca is already cooked before it goes in.
- Which tapiocaThe two-hour soak points to ordinary pearl (or flake) tapioca rather than the quick-cooking sort; "Minute Tapioca" as the recipe names it needs no soak. Instant tapioca flour or starch will not work here -- it turns to glue rather than porridge.
- Ounces by weight1 ounce butter is 2 tablespoons. 1 ounce Parmesan is about 1/3 cup finely grated. 1 ounce of dry breadcrumbs is roughly 1/4 cup; if soft fresh crumbs are used, about 1/2 cup.
- The tablespoon is smallOne tablespoon of dry pearl tapioca swells to only a few tablespoons of porridge -- barely enough to cover two sliced tomatoes in anything but a very small dish. Use a 1-pint gratin dish, or double the tapioca and cheese if you want a 2-cup dish filled.
- Cook the tapioca fullyThe hinge of the dish. Underdone pearls stay opaque and gritty in the middle and will not soften further in the oven, since there is little free liquid left. Simmer until every pearl is translucent through, then season.
- Tomato waterPeeled sliced tomatoes shed a lot of juice, which pools under the tapioca and thins it. Salt the slices and drain them for ten minutes, or lay them on the buttered dish and let them stand while the tapioca finishes.
- Season hardThe instruction to "season well" is doing real work. Boiled tapioca is flavourless starch; salt, pepper and the Parmesan are the whole seasoning of the dish. Taste the tapioca before it goes over the tomatoes.
- YieldA very small dish: two modest servings at most. It does not reheat well -- the tapioca stiffens and weeps.
Meatless cookery books multiplied in English and American kitchens on two tracks: Lenten and vegetarian cooking on one, and wartime and depression thrift on the other, and by the 1910s the two had largely merged. The logic behind a dish like this is nutritional bookkeeping rather than flavour -- tapioca supplies the bulk and Parmesan stands in for the protein of the absent meat. Tapioca itself is the washed starch of the cassava root, brought into European and North American trade from Brazil and Southeast Asia, and by this date it was cheap, shelf-stable and mostly known as a nursery pudding, which is why cookbook writers kept trying to push it toward savoury use. The nod to "Minute Tapioca" is a period marker: pre-treated quick-cooking tapioca was sold under brand names in this era, and recipe writers routinely referred readers to the directions on the package rather than repeating them.