Home › Puddings and Desserts › Cherry Tapioca
Cherry Tapioca
3/4 cup tapioca 1 quart water Sugar 1 cup stoned cherries Soak the tapioca and boil it in the water until clear, sweetening to taste. Add the stoned cherries; cook for three minutes and set aside to cool. Serve with cream.
Peaches or other fruit may be used instead of cherries.
A plain boiled tapioca sweetened and finished with fresh fruit. The only real difficulty is the tapioca itself, which in this period meant pearl tapioca rather than the granulated product most shops now stock.
- The stray last lineThe words "2 pounds white figs 2 cups sugar" at the end belong to the next recipe on the leaf and have nothing to do with this pudding. Ignore them.
- Which tapiocaAssume pearl tapioca, the small opaque beads, not instant or "minute" tapioca. Instant is pre-cooked and granulated: used at 3/4 cup in a quart of water it will thicken into paste within a few minutes rather than swelling into distinct clear beads.
- The soakThe recipe says to soak but gives no time. Small pearl tapioca wants at least an hour in cold water; large pearls are better left several hours or overnight. Soaking is what lets the centres cook through before the outsides dissolve.
- Cooked until clearThis is the hinge. The beads go from chalky white to translucent all the way through, with no opaque dot in the middle. Depending on pearl size that is anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes of gentle simmering, stirred often so nothing catches on the bottom.
- Sugar to tasteAround 1/2 to 3/4 cup for the quart suits sour cherries; halve that for sweet ones or for peaches. Add it once the tapioca is clear rather than at the start, so the beads hydrate in plain water.
- Three minutes for the cherriesThat is deliberate and correct. Longer and stoned cherries collapse and bleed their colour through the whole pot. Frozen pitted cherries work; add them still frozen and give them the same short cooking.
- It sets as it coolsStraight off the heat this looks far too loose. Tapioca thickens considerably on cooling, so judge the consistency cold, not hot. Press a film against the surface if you dislike a skin.
- Yield and servingA quart of liquid gives about six servings. "Serve with cream" most likely indicates plain unwhipped pouring cream, cold, over a cold pudding.
Tapioca is starch washed out of the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders to Africa and Asia, and it reached northern kitchens as a dried, imported store-cupboard good rather than a fresh vegetable. Through the nineteenth century it belonged to the same family of cheap thickeners as sago and arrowroot, valued for invalid cookery and nursery suppers because it was bland, digestible and kept indefinitely in a jar. Pudding recipes like this one show the ingredient in its older form, where the cook did the soaking and the long boiling herself; the granulated quick-cooking tapiocas that displaced pearl in most home kitchens came later and changed both the method and the texture. The instruction that peaches or other fruit may be substituted is the sort of line found in printed cookbooks of every kind, offering one adaptable formula rather than a dozen fixed ones.