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Tapioca-and-Banana Sponge
Sprinkle half a cup of tapioca and two-thirds a cup of sugar into one pint of boiling water; add half a teaspoonful of salt and cook over hot water, stirring occasionally. When the tapioca is transparent, add the juice of two lemons, and fold in the whites of two eggs, beaten until dry. Serve spread over sliced bananas, with cream and sugar, or with a cold boiled custard, previously made.
This dish may be prepared with canned peaches, apricots or quinces, using the juice of the fruit instead of water.
A cooked tapioca base lightened with meringue and served cold over fruit. Two things decide whether it works: the kind of tapioca you buy, and how patient you are with the double boiler.
- Which tapiocaAround 1900 a cook might reach for either pearl tapioca, which wants a long soak in cold water before it will swell and clear, or one of the granulated quick-cooking products; the instruction here to sprinkle it straight into boiling water, with no soaking mentioned, suggests a fine grain. Modern quick-cooking (granulated) tapioca needs no soaking and thickens in a fraction of the time, and you will likely want rather less than the 1/2 cup called for here.
- Cook over hot water, not on the burnerThe instruction to "cook over hot water" means a double boiler, and it is not optional. Tapioca and sugar scorch and stick over direct heat, and the grains break down into glue instead of staying whole and glossy.
- "Transparent" is the doneness testStop when the individual grains have lost their white opaque centres and the mass looks like clouded glass. Undercooked tapioca stays chalky at the core; overcooked, it goes stringy and the sponge weeps as it cools.
- Lemon juiceThe juice of two lemons is roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons, which against 2/3 cup of sugar gives a sharply tart result. Add it off the heat and taste before you commit to all of it.
- The egg whitesWhites beaten "until dry" means stiff, past the soft-peak stage but not grainy. They are folded into the hot tapioca and never cooked further, so the heat they get is incidental; if that matters in your household, use pasteurized whites.
- Folding and settingFold while the tapioca is still hot enough to slacken but not boiling, in three additions, and stop as soon as no white streaks remain. Chill at least two hours; the sponge is meant to be served cold over the bananas, which should be sliced at the last minute so they do not brown.
- The canned-fruit variantSubstituting the juice or syrup from canned peaches, apricots or quinces for the pint of water will usually mean a good deal more sugar in the dish, so you may want to cut the 2/3 cup back and adjust with lemon.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pint of water with half a cup of tapioca will probably serve four to six, the larger number if the boiled custard is served alongside.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, reached American kitchens as an inexpensive imported thickener, and granulated "minute" products were on the market from the 1890s. "Sponge" in books of this period generally denotes a starch or gelatine base lightened with beaten egg white, as against a "cream" enriched with dairy or a "snow" that is mostly meringue, though period usage of these terms was not consistent. Bananas were becoming cheaper and more common in Northern cities in the same decades, as steam shipping and the growing fruit trade brought them in, and books of this vintage put them into everything from salads to fritters.