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Tapioca (Tablespoons tapioca quart milk)
4 tablespoons tapioca 1 quart milk Yolks of 3 eggs 2/3 cup sugar 1/3 cup shredded cocoanut 1 teaspoon vanilla Whites of 3 eggs 3 tablespoons sugar Soak the tapioca in water over night; drain and add the milk. Bring slowly to the boiling point; stir in the yolks of the eggs, beaten with the sugar. Cook until the custard thickens, stirring all the time; then remove from the fire and add the cocoanut and the vanilla. Make a meringue of the whites of eggs and sugar; pile lightly over the custard and set in the oven until delicately browned.
A quart-sized baked tapioca custard of the sort that filled the pudding pages of every early twentieth-century cookbook. Two things decide whether it works: the kind of tapioca you buy and how gently you handle the eggs.
- Use large pearl tapiocaThe overnight soak only makes sense for old-fashioned pearl tapioca, which needs hours to hydrate. Instant or minute tapioca will dissolve to glue; small pearl needs no more than 30 minutes.
- Cook the custard gentlyA quart of milk thickened with three yolks will curdle if it actually boils. Bring it just to a simmer and finish over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring constantly until it coats a spoon, around 170-175F.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks with the sugar, then whisk in a ladleful of the hot milk before returning everything to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to hot milk, as the terse original implies, scrambles them.
- Shredded cocoanutIn cookbooks of this period this generally meant unsweetened coconut, either freshly grated or the dried shred sold in bulk. Modern bagged sweetened flake will push the pudding sugary; use unsweetened and keep the 2/3 cup of sugar as written.
- Meringue proportionsThree tablespoons of sugar to three whites is a soft, old-style meringue. Beat the whites to soft peaks, add the sugar gradually, and beat to firm and glossy so it does not weep on the warm custard.
- Oven for browningThe book assumes you know the heat. A moderate oven, roughly 350F, will give the "delicate" brown in about ten to fifteen minutes; watch it rather than trusting the clock, since the point is to colour the meringue, not to cook the pudding further. Seal the meringue to the edge of the dish so it does not shrink away.
- YieldA quart of milk makes about six to eight servings. Bake in a single 2-quart dish and serve warm or at room temperature; refrigerated meringue softens and beads by the next day.
Tapioca is the starch of the cassava root, native to South America and carried by Portuguese and Spanish trade routes into West Africa and Asia; by the late nineteenth century it reached American grocers as hard white pearls sold from the bulk bin, cheap and shelf-stable, and it became a standard thickener for milk puddings alongside rice and sago. Pudding sections in cookbooks of this period lean heavily on this pattern: a quart of milk, a few eggs, a starch, and a meringue lid to use up the whites left from the yolk-thickened custard. The coconut marks the recipe as a slightly dressier version - shredded coconut became a popular ingredient once desiccated coconut was widely packaged, and it turns a plain nursery pudding into something fit to bring to the table.