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Seventh Day: Jelly
No. 87. TAPIOCA JELLY.
Soak two oz. tapioca five hours, or over night, in half a pint of cold water; put it over the fire with another half pint cold water, and when quite thick add half a tumbler boiling water; let it boil until the pieces look perfectly clear, then add four tablespoonfuls sugar, and flavor with two teaspoons brandy or two tablespoons wine. If lemon is preferred, boil the rind of one with the tapioca until it is flavored, and add some of the juice, if the flavor is liked so strong. Pour it into small moulds wet with water, and set it on the ice. "Why must the moulds be wet, Aunty?" "To prevent the tapioca from sticking to them. In turning out moulds of jelly or blanc-mange, you know, we warm them outside with a towel wrung out of boiling water, or set them for a moment into a pan of hot water, to melt the surface next the mould; but tapioca is so sticky, this is not always sufficient."
A starch-set jelly rather than a gelatin one: the tapioca itself does the thickening, so the texture is soft and slightly chewy rather than the clean shiver of a wine jelly. Two details govern success — the long soak and cooking until every pearl is transparent.
- Use pearl tapiocaThis calls for small pearl tapioca, the kind that must be soaked. Instant or "minute" tapioca is pre-cooked and ground, and will turn to paste rather than holding its individual clear beads.
- The soak is not optionalFive hours or overnight in cold water hydrates the pearls through to the center. Skipped or shortened, the middles stay chalky and opaque and no amount of boiling will bring them clear.
- MeasuresTwo ounces of tapioca is about 1/3 cup dry. Half a pint is one cup, so the pearls take a cup of soaking water plus a cup for cooking. A tumbler in this period is roughly 8 ounces, so "half a tumbler boiling water" is about 1/2 cup, added to loosen the mixture as it stiffens.
- Cook to clear, not to a clockNo time is given because the visual cue is the whole test. Simmer gently, stirring often — tapioca catches and scorches on a thin pan bottom — until there is no white speck left in any pearl.
- Sugar and flavoringFour tablespoons is quite lightly sweetened by modern dessert standards; taste and adjust before molding. The recipe does not say whether the pan is off the fire when the brandy or wine goes in; the lemon version, with the rind boiled in from the start, gives a rounder flavor.
- "Set it on the ice"The icebox, or the moulds stood directly on ice. Give it several hours; the jelly firms as the starch cools and retrogrades, and it will be noticeably softer than a gelatin mold even when fully set.
- UnmoldingThe wetted mold is the whole trick, and Aunty is right that the hot-towel method alone often fails here. Rinse the molds with cold water and do not dry them, then run a thin knife around the edge before inverting.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups of finished jelly — four to six small molds, or four modest servings. It is best eaten the day it is made, as the starch weeps and toughens after a day in the cold.
Six Little Cooks belongs to a small genre of the 1870s and 1880s in which cookery was taught to children through a story — an aunt, a kitchen, and a rotation of days, with the recipes numbered and the questions from the pupils left in the text. Tapioca, the starch extracted from cassava root, was by this date a cheap pantry staple in American kitchens, sold as "pearl" or "flake." It appears constantly in nineteenth-century invalid cookery and children's cookery for the same reasons: it is bland, cheap, keeps indefinitely dry, and sets without gelatin, which in the 1870s still often meant boiling down calves' feet or buying expensive sheet isinglass. A jelly a child could make unaided, from a jar on the shelf and a stove, was exactly the point of the lesson.