Tapioca Soup
1 quart bean stock 4 ounces tapioca Seasoning Boil the stock in a saucepan and sprinkle in the tapioca. Cook for twenty minutes. Season with pepper and salt.
Three lines and one variable that decides everything: what kind of tapioca you use. The original assumes small pearl tapioca, which is not what most shops now sell.
- Bean stockThe liquid left from boiling dried beans (haricot, navy, butter beans) rather than a canned broth. It is starchy and faintly sweet, so it thickens alongside the tapioca; if you use the drained liquid from canned beans, rinse-and-dilute is wise since it is heavily salted and you will be seasoning at the end.
- 4 ounces tapiocaBy weight, roughly two-thirds of a cup of small pearl tapioca. In a quart of stock that produces something closer to a thick pottage than a soup — halve it for a spoonable consistency, or add more stock as it swells.
- Which tapiocaSmall pearl (sago-sized) is what the twenty minutes is written for. Quick-cooking or "instant" granules are done in about five to eight minutes and will turn gluey if held for twenty; large pearls, the boba kind, take considerably longer.
- Stir, and keep the heat lowSprinkle the tapioca into moving liquid rather than tipping it in, or it clumps on contact and the centres of the lumps stay chalky. Once it is in, a bare simmer with occasional stirring — a hard boil scorches the starch on the pan bottom.
- Done means clearThe pearls should be translucent all through with no white speck at the centre. That, not the clock, is the test.
- SeasoningPepper and salt alone leave this very plain. A bay leaf or an onion in the stock while it heats, and a squeeze of lemon or a spoon of butter at the end, does the dish a favour.
- Yield and holdingAbout four servings. It thickens further as it stands and sets almost solid when cold, so thin it with hot stock when reheating.
Tapioca is the washed starch of the cassava root, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders into Asia and Africa, and by the nineteenth century it was reaching British and American kitchens as cheap, keeping, imported pearls — often used for nursery puddings. A tapioca soup built on bean stock belongs to the logic of meatless cookery: pulses supply the protein, the water they cooked in is too good to pour away, and a starch does the thickening work that a meat stock's gelatine would otherwise do. The recipe is an exercise in getting two dishes from one pot of beans, which is why it is so bare — it was never meant to be the interesting part of the meal.