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Caramel Tapioca Pudding
One quart of water, 4 tbsp. tapioca, 1 cup dark brown sugar, 2 tbsp. butter. Mix and let stand one hour on back of stove. Bake two hours. Cool and beat into this, whipped cream and serve with spoonful of whipped cream on top.
— Eva Wood
A church-supper pudding that relies on long, slow soaking and baking rather than stirring on the stovetop. The proportions look thin in the bowl and will stay loose until the tapioca has had its full two hours.
- Which tapiocaThis most likely means pearl tapioca, which needs the full hour of soaking and the long bake to swell and clear. Quick-cooking tapioca, also available by this period, will thicken in minutes and can turn to paste over two hours; if that is all you have, use less water and watch it from the first half hour.
- "Back of the stove"On a coal or wood range the back was the cool zone, warm but never simmering. A warm spot on the counter, or the oven set to its lowest setting for a few minutes then turned off, gives the same effect: the point is to hydrate the tapioca, not to cook it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A slow oven, in the range of 300 to 325F, suits a two-hour bake; a hotter oven risks drying or catching the sugar at the edges before the centre sets. Covering the dish is a reasonable precaution, though the recipe does not call for it.
- Quart and tablespoonA quart is 4 cups. The tablespoons are near enough to modern ones. Four tablespoons of tapioca to a quart of water is a very loose ratio, and the long bake presumably serves to reduce the liquid as well as swell the tapioca.
- The missing saltThere is none in the list, and the pudding tastes flat without it. A quarter teaspoon stirred in with the sugar sharpens the caramel considerably.
- Cooling before the creamThis is the hinge. Beating whipped cream into a warm pudding melts it back to liquid and you lose the whole point of the dish. Chill the pudding thoroughly first, then fold rather than beat, so the air survives.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much cream to beat in. A quart of base makes roughly six to eight servings. Serve in glasses or shallow dishes with the reserved spoonful on top.
Tapioca reached North American kitchens as a cheap, shelf-stable starch extracted from cassava root, and by the late nineteenth century it had become the backbone of the thrifty family pudding, appearing in community cookbooks alongside cornstarch and rice puddings for the same reason: it turned water, sugar and a little butter into a dessert. The "caramel" here owes less to sugar burnt in a pan than to the molasses in the dark brown sugar, and the whipped cream folded in at the end is what lifts an everyday nursery pudding into something fit for company. Philathea cook books were compiled by Philathea classes, the young women's Bible-study groups of the early twentieth-century Baraca-Philathea Sunday school movement, and the signed contribution from Eva Wood is typical of the form: recipes often seem to have carried their cook's name, which one might read as both credit and guarantee.