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Chafing-dish Dainties (Tapioca is transparent add)
tapioca is transparent, add the juice of a lemon, and fold in the whites of two eggs, beaten until dry. Serve with cream and sugar.
This is the tail end of a lemon tapioca pudding cooked over a chafing-dish lamp; the opening lines, with the quantities of tapioca, water and sugar, sit on the previous page. What survives here is the finishing sequence, which is where the dish is actually won or lost.
- The fragmentEverything before "tapioca is transparent" is missing: the tapioca will have been cooked, most likely after soaking, in water or milk until clear. Read this as the last part of a recipe, not a complete one.
- Which tapiocaA recipe of this period most likely means pearl tapioca, usually soaked before cooking, though granulated and quick-cooking tapiocas were also sold by the 1890s. Modern quick-cooking or minute tapioca thickens in about five minutes and will turn to paste if given the old soaking and simmering time. As a workable modern proportion, roughly a third of a cup of pearl tapioca to two cups of liquid.
- "Transparent" is the doneness cueThe pearls should be clear all the way through with no white speck at the centre. A chalky core means the starch has not hydrated and the pudding will be gritty no matter how long it stands.
- Add the lemon off the heatThe juice of one lemon is about three tablespoons. Acid added to a boiling starch thins it; take the pan off the flame, or swing it off the chafing-dish burner, before stirring the juice in.
- "Beaten until dry"Period shorthand for whites whipped to the stiff-peak stage, just short of the point where they look grainy and begin to weep. Fold them into the hot tapioca in two additions so the mixture stays light.
- The eggsFolded into hot tapioca off the heat, the whites are warmed but not reliably cooked through. Use pasteurized whites if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
Tapioca is the starch of the cassava root, imported into nineteenth-century American kitchens as hard little pearls and prized for producing a pudding that was light, cheap and easy on invalids. Its appearance here, in the chafing-dish chapter, belongs to a particular moment: from roughly the 1890s through the 1900s the chafing dish was the fashionable apparatus of the American middle-class household, sold as the equipment of late suppers, club rooms and hostesses who wished to cook in front of their guests rather than behind a kitchen door. Books of the period, this one among them, gathered dishes that could be managed in one shallow pan over a spirit lamp: creamed oysters, rarebits, scrambles, and simple sweets like this one, where the only demands are patience while the pearls clear and a steady hand folding in the whites.