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Tapioca Pudding
1 ounce tapioca 1 pint milk 1 dessertspoon sugar 1/2 ounce butter Thin rind of 1/2 lemon 1 tablespoon finely grated bread crumbs A little grated nutmeg Wash the tapioca, and put it in a pie dish. Cover it with boiling water, and let it stand an hour. Pour off any of the water that has not been absorbed. Meantime, put the milk to simmer with the lemon rind, until it is nicely flavored, then remove the lemon, and add the sugar and butter. Sprinkle the bread crumbs over the tapioca, and pour over the milk. Grate a little nutmeg over the pudding, and bake for an hour in a moderate oven.
A plain baked milk pudding with no eggs, thickened entirely by soaked tapioca. It is slow and unfussy, and the only things that go wrong are the wrong sort of tapioca and too hot an oven.
- Use pearl tapiocaThe hour-long soak assumes whole pearls, not instant or quick-cooking granules, which dissolve and turn gluey with that treatment. Small pearl tapioca gives the intended texture; large pearls need the full soak and may want a little longer in the oven.
- Weights and spoonsOne ounce of tapioca is about 2 tablespoons to a scant quarter cup by volume. A dessertspoon is two teaspoons, so the sugar is a modest amount — this pudding is barely sweet by current standards. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Which pintIf the book is following imperial measure, a pint is 20 fl oz (2 1/2 cups); an American pint is 16 fl oz (2 cups). Either works, the larger giving a looser set. Start with 2 cups if you want it firm enough to slice cold.
- Moderate oven350F. A milk pudding with no eggs is forgiving, but above about 375F the surface skin browns and toughens before the tapioca has swelled through.
- Pie dishA shallow ceramic or glass baking dish holding about a quart. Shallow matters — it gives the browned nutmeg-flecked top that is the point of a baked milk pudding, and the crumbs help set that crust.
- Lemon rindPare it thin with a peeler so no white pith goes in, and give the milk ten to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer. Don't let the milk boil hard or it will catch and taste scorched.
- ServingA pint of milk makes about four servings, or three generous ones; stewed or preserved fruit alongside is traditional.
Tapioca is starch extracted from cassava root, native to South America and carried through the tropics by Portuguese trade; by the nineteenth century it reached British and American kitchens as dried pearls and was treated exactly like sago, rice or semolina — that is, boiled or baked slowly in milk into a nursery pudding. The lemon rind and grated nutmeg are the standard English flavourings for a baked milk pudding, doing the work that vanilla extract would do in a later recipe.