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Apple Tapioca (2 1/3 cups)
1/2 cup quick tapioca 1/2 cup sugar 3 cups water Pinch salt 4 medium-size cooking apples Boil tapioca, sugar, salt and water together (or cook in double boiler) till tapioca is clear. Slice apples in a buttered baking dish, pour the tapioca over them, bake in moderate oven till apples are tender. Add little water as baking, if it cooks away.
A plain nursery pudding that works well as written, provided the tapioca is fully hydrated before it meets the apples. Two points of translation are all it really needs: what "quick tapioca" meant, and what "moderate oven" means in numbers.
- Cook the tapioca until clear firstThis is the hinge. Granules that are still chalky white will keep absorbing liquid in the oven and leave you with a stiff, cloudy mass around underdone apples. Simmer, stirring often, until every grain is translucent, then take it off the heat.
- Quick tapiocaThis means the small granulated type sold today as quick-cooking or minute tapioca, not pearl tapioca and not boba. Pearl tapioca needs a long soak and much more liquid, so it cannot be substituted measure for measure here.
- Moderate ovenConventionally around 350F (sources of the period place "moderate" anywhere from 325F to 375F). The recipe gives no time; bake until a knife slides into the apple slices without resistance, which will likely take somewhere in the region of 35 to 45 minutes.
- Cooking applesA tart, firm variety that holds its shape: Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy. Four medium apples is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb whole, or about 4 cups sliced. The recipe does not say whether to peel and core; coring is necessary and peeling is the usual assumption for a pudding of this kind, but it is not stated.
- The liquid looks excessiveThree cups of water to half a cup of tapioca is what the recipe calls for, and the mixture will look soupy on the stove before it sets to a soft, spoonable pudding. The instruction to add a little water during baking is there to cover what evaporates.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of sugar suits genuinely sour cooking apples. With modern dessert apples it will be cloying, so cut it to a third of a cup and consider a scrape of lemon zest.
- Dish and yieldThe recipe specifies a buttered baking dish; given three cups of water plus the apples, allow a dish of at least two quarts. What the printed "2 1/3 cups" refers to is unclear, as it is well short of the combined volume of the ingredients.