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Apple Tapioca Pudding
1 quart peeled apples 1 cup tapioca 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt Teaspoon lemon extract Quarter apples and fill bake dish. Sprinkle half sugar over apples. Soak tapioca in quart of hot water 1 hour. Add salt, lemon extract, and rest of sugar. Pour over apples. Bake until apples are tender. Serve with hard sauce. NOTE-Peaches, pears, plums, etc., can be cooked in same way. BREAD PUDDING (CHOCOLATE) 2 cups stale bread crumbs 4 cups milk 3 tablespoons sugar 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg 2 ounces grated bitter chocolate Put bread, milk, nutmeg and chocolate in a bowl, and soak for 2 or 3 hours. Beat together eggs, sugar and salt. Mash soaked bread with a spoon, and add egg mixture to bread and milk. Pour into a pudding dish, and bake in a slow oven for about 40 minutes. Serve with cream sauce.
BREAD PUDDING (PLAIN) 1 small loaf stale bread 1 quart milk 1/3 cup sugar 2 eggs, well beaten 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/4 cup butter, melted Remove soft part from loaf, and put through a colander (there should be 2 cups full). Scald milk, pour over crumbs, let stand until cool. Add eggs, sugar, butter, salt and vanilla. Bake in a buttered pudding dish, in a slow oven, one hour. Serve with vanilla sauce. Raisins or currants can be added to above if desired. 1/4 box gelatine 1/4 cup cold water 1/8 cup cream
A plain baked fruit-and-tapioca pudding of the sort that turned a few apples and a pantry staple into supper's last course. Nothing here is difficult, but the tapioca and the vague bake time both need translating.
- Which tapioca"Tapioca" here most likely means small pearl tapioca, which would account for the full hour's soak in hot water. Modern quick-cooking (granulated) tapioca is not a like-for-like substitute at this volume: it thickens in minutes and a cup of it against a quart of water is likely to go gluey. If pearl tapioca is what you have, the one-hour soak is the step that makes the recipe work.
- A quart of applesFruit measured by volume after peeling and quartering. A quart is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of prepared apple, about four medium fruit. Use a variety that holds its shape rather than one that collapses to sauce.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because the original cook judged by her range. Bake at 350F; the apples will be tender in 45 to 60 minutes and the tapioca will have gone from opaque white to clear. Clarity of the pearls, not the clock, is the doneness signal.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract is assertive by current standards. The zest of one lemon, or half the extract, gives a cleaner result.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce: butter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavouring (vanilla, brandy or lemon), chilled firm and set on the hot pudding to melt. Allow about 1/2 cup butter to 1 cup sugar.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon in a pudding this size is right, not a misprint. Tapioca and apple both taste flat without it.
- YieldServes about six. Note that a quart of apples plus the tapioca and its quart of soaking water will need a dish of at least 3 quarts. The pudding thickens further as it stands and is better warm than hot.
- The other recipes on the pageThe two bread puddings that follow are set in a "slow oven", generally taken to mean somewhere around 300-325F. Both are baked custards, so pull them when the centre is just set and still trembling; carried past that they weep. "Bitter chocolate" is unsweetened baking chocolate.
Tapioca is cassava starch, processed into pearls and shipped to American and European kitchens from Brazil and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century, where it became a cheap thickener and the backbone of nursery and boarding-house desserts. Its neutrality was the point: it stretched fruit, set without eggs, and cost little. Community and "reliable recipe" collections of the period print several versions and, as here, append a note that peaches, pears or plums will do just as well. The instruction to serve with hard sauce places the dish in an Anglo-American tradition of its own. Hard sauce melting over hot pudding was the standard finish for everything from plum duff to apple dumplings, and it did the work that cream or ice cream does now.