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Tapioca Custard Pudding
1 cup pearl or minute tapioca 1 cup water 3 cups milk 1 tablespoon butter 3 eggs 3/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt Soak pearl tapioca in cold water one hour; drain and add water. Heat to boiling point; add milk, sugar and salt, cook slowly for five minutes, being careful not to let it burn. Place in cooker for two hours. Add the well-beaten eggs and butter. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan and bake until brown. The minute tapioca needs no soaking.
A fireless-cooker pudding adapted for a stove and oven. The cooker step is simply long, gentle heat retention, which an oven or a low burner reproduces without difficulty.
- The fireless cookerA "cooker" here is an insulated box that holds a preheated pot at slowly falling temperature for hours with no fuel. The equivalent is a covered heavy pot in a 200-225F oven, or a slow cooker on low, until the tapioca pearls are clear and swollen; check at the one-hour mark rather than waiting the full two.
- Pearl versus minute tapiocaPearl tapioca is the large bead form and genuinely needs the hour-long soak. "Minute" tapioca is precooked and granulated, cooks in a few minutes, and as the recipe says needs no soaking. The recipe treats a cup of either as interchangeable, though granulated tapioca packs more densely than whole pearls and may well give a stiffer pudding; if using it, consider starting with less.
- Bake until brownNo temperature is given; the instruction is only to bake until the top browns. A moderate oven, around 350F, for 25 to 35 minutes will set the custard and colour the top without curdling it.
- Tempering the eggsThe tapioca base comes out of the cooker still hot, and beaten eggs poured straight in can curdle. Whisk a ladleful of the hot mixture into the eggs first, then return the lot to the pot.
- The saltA full teaspoon in a sweet custard reads high to modern palates. Half a teaspoon of fine table salt is nearer the effect most cooks will want.
- ButterOne tablespoon stirred in at the end is for richness and gloss, not structure. It can be melted first so it disperses rather than sitting in streaks.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of finished pudding, serving six to eight. A two-quart buttered dish gives room to spare, and the pudding rises very little.
- ServingGood warm or cold; cream or a spoonful of preserved fruit suits it. It thickens considerably as it cools and will need loosening with milk if held overnight.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households in the first decades of the twentieth century: an insulated box, sometimes packed with hay or sawdust and fitted with soapstone discs, let a cook bring a pot to the boil on the range and then finish it on stored heat while she left the kitchen. It saved coal, saved attention, and suited exactly the sort of long, low-temperature dish that scorches on a direct flame, which is why a starchy milk pudding like this one turns up in the chapter. Tapioca itself is cassava starch, processed into pearls in Southeast Asia and Brazil and shipped in bulk to Europe and North America through the nineteenth century, where it became a cheap thickener and nursery food. "Minute" tapioca, the precooked granulated form, appears as an alternative in the recipe, which takes care to explain that it needs no soaking.