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Tapioca Pudding
Soak 4 tablespoons tapioca in a little water; boil 1 quart milk and pour over it while hot; when cool add 1/2 cup sugar, 1 egg and yolks of 2 eggs (well beaten), bake; when done beat the 2 whites with 2 tablespoons sugar and spread on top. 1½ cups flour
A plain baked tapioca custard of the sort that filled the pudding slot in every late-Victorian recipe collection. Two things need clearing up before you start: the tapioca itself, and the line of type that has wandered in at the end.
- Ignore the trailing flourThe "1 1/2 cups flour" at the end is a stray line, almost certainly a fragment of an adjacent recipe picked up in printing or transcription. There is no flour in a baked tapioca custard; adding it gives a paste.
- Which tapiocaIn a collection of this period this meant pearl tapioca, which genuinely needs soaking — an hour at minimum, and overnight is better for large pearls. Modern quick-cooking or minute tapioca is pre-gelatinised and needs no soak at all; use about 3 tablespoons of it and add it straight to the hot milk.
- Soak water"A little water" means just enough to cover; the pearls should absorb nearly all of it and swell to translucent grey. Drain off anything left standing before the milk goes in.
- Cool before the eggsThis is the hinge. Pouring boiling milk onto beaten yolks scrambles them; the recipe's instruction to wait until cool is doing real work. Cool to warm-but-not-hot, then temper by stirring a ladle of the milk into the eggs before combining.
- Oven and vesselBake at 325F in a buttered 2-quart dish set in a pan of hot water. A custard this lean sets in 45 to 60 minutes, and is done when the edges are firm and the centre still trembles slightly.
- The meringueSpread the sweetened whites over the hot pudding, sealing them to the edges of the dish, and return it to the oven at 350F for 10 to 12 minutes until the peaks colour. Two tablespoons of sugar to two whites is a soft, old-fashioned meringue that weeps if it stands — serve the same day.
- YieldA quart of milk makes six modest servings. Good warm or at room temperature; refrigerate if keeping overnight.
Tapioca is starch extracted from cassava root, imported into North American and European kitchens in dried pearl form through the nineteenth century and prized in domestic manuals as a cheap, bland, easily digested thickener — nursery and invalid cookery leaned on it heavily. This recipe is the standard formula of its day: milk, eggs, sugar and a starch, with the whites saved back for a meringue lid so that nothing is wasted, a habit visible all through books of this period. Pearl tapioca's long soak was the chief complaint against it, and pre-cooked "minute" tapioca was on the American market from the mid-1890s.