Tapioca Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 6 persons.-5 oz. of tapioca, 2 quarts of medium stock. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 8d.
Put the tapioca into cold stock, and bring it gradually to a boil. Simmer gently till tender, and serve.
TIME. Rather more than 1 hour.
SEASONABLE all the year.
A thin, restorative soup of the plainest Victorian kind: stock thickened lightly with tapioca and nothing else. Two things decide whether it works — the grade of tapioca and how much you stir it.
- The garbled openingThe first words, "of the acidity of", are stray type carried over from the neighbouring entry in the original book. Begin at the ingredient list.
- Quantities5 oz of tapioca is roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of the small pearl or granulated sort. Two quarts here are imperial quarts, about 2.3 litres. Serves six as a first course.
- "Medium stock"Beeton gave stocks of differing strength, among them a rich strong stock, a medium stock and more economical versions. Her medium stock is an ordinary beef and veal stock of moderate body. A good unsalted beef stock stands in perfectly.
- Which tapiocaNineteenth-century tapioca was usually the small flake or seed pearl. Modern large boba pearls behave differently — they need pre-soaking and will sit whole in the bowl rather than dissolving into the stock. Small pearl or granulated is what this recipe assumes.
- The timing"Rather more than 1 hour" reflects the coarse, slow-hydrating tapioca of the period. Modern small pearl tapioca is tender and translucent in 15-20 minutes; granulated in less. Cook it until no white core remains at the centre of a pearl and stop there.
- Starting cold, and stirringAdding the tapioca to cold stock and heating gradually is the point of the method — it keeps the grains separate. Stir often as it comes up, and keep it at a bare simmer; tapioca sinks and scorches on the bottom of the pan given the chance.
- It thickens on standingThe soup goes on absorbing after the heat is off and will set to a near-jelly if held. Make it close to serving, or slacken with hot stock before it goes to the table.
- SeasoningNo seasoning is specified because the stock was expected to carry it. Taste and correct with salt and pepper at the end; a little sherry or lemon juice lifts what is otherwise a very quiet soup.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by traders through the tropics and reaching British kitchens as a cheap imported dry good — most of Beeton's shilling-and-eightpence for six will have gone on the stock rather than the starch. It sits with the plain thickened soups alongside sago, vermicelli and semolina: designed to make a modest quantity of stock go round a table, and considered gentle enough for invalids and children, a use that recurs throughout Victorian and Edwardian cookery writing. Adding the grain to cold liquid and raising it slowly appears in other starch-soup recipes of the period as well.