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Tapioca (Tablespoon lemon juice Sugar)
1/2 cup tapioca. 1 pint boiling water. 1 tablespoon lemon juice Sugar Grated nutmeg Soak the tapioca in water sufficient to cover it; stir it into the boiling water and let it simmer until thoroughly dissolved. If too thick, add more boiling water. Sweeten to taste; add the lemon and grate alittle nutmeg over the top.
The loose-leaf format has cost this page its ingredient list: only the lemon juice, sugar and nutmeg survive, and the quantities of tapioca and water are gone. What remains is a workable method for a thin tapioca pudding or invalid gruel, but you will be supplying the proportions yourself.
- Missing quantitiesThe original gives no measure for tapioca or water. A conventional proportion for this style of dish is about 1/3 cup pearl tapioca to 3 cups water; treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- Which tapiocaThe soaking step reads as old-style pearl tapioca, which needs a long soak and long simmer to go clear. Modern quick-cooking or "minute" tapioca is pre-gelatinized and is likely to break down to paste under this treatment; large or small pearls are the safer choice.
- The soak mattersThe recipe sets no soaking time; an hour is usually reckoned the minimum, and older pearls may do better left overnight. Underhydrated pearls tend to keep an opaque chalky centre that further simmering will not fix.
- "Thoroughly dissolved"The pearls do not literally dissolve; they swell and go translucent, which is what the instruction is describing. Expect 20 to 40 minutes of gentle simmering with frequent stirring, since tapioca settles and scorches on the pan bottom.
- It thickens off the heatStop while the mixture still looks slightly loose. Tapioca sets considerably as it cools, and a pudding that is right in the pan will be stiff on the plate.
- Lemon and nutmeg lastAdd the tablespoon of lemon juice and the sugar after cooking. Acid added early can interfere with the starch setting, and the nutmeg is grated over the top as a finish, not stirred in.
- Yield and servingAt the proportions above, four small servings. Serve warm or cold, with cream or milk poured over.
Tapioca is starch extracted from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders into Africa and Asia, where the pearled form familiar to Anglo-American cooks was largely manufactured for export. Nineteenth-century household books treated it above all as invalid food: cheap, bland, easily digested, and thickening into something between a gruel and a pudding, in the same family as arrowroot, sago and barley water. The lemon juice and grated nutmeg here are doing the whole work of flavor, a pairing that is common in sickroom cookery of the period, where a little acid and a little spice were expected to make an otherwise characterless dish palatable.