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Frozen Tapioca Custard
3 quarts of milk. 20 ounces of sugar. 6 or 7 ounces of tapioca 2 ounces of butter. 12 yolks or 8 whole eggs. Flavoring. 1 cupful of thick cream to whip in at last.
The pearl tapioca is the most suitable. If the large grained sort is used crush it on the table with the rolling-pin and then sift away the dust. Steep the tapioca 2 hours in a quart of milk cold, but set it in a warm place. Boil the rest of the milk with the sugar in it, then add the steeped tapioca, cook for 15 minutes. Stir in the butter, then the beaten yolks and take the custard immediately off the fire, cool, flavor with vanilla or lemon, and freeze like ice cream, and when nearly finished add the cup of cream whipped to a froth, and beat well.
A commercial-scale frozen custard: three quarts of milk will give you something over a gallon of finished ice cream, so most home cooks will want to divide the recipe by three or four. The one thing to get right is the egg stage.
- The hinge: the yolksBeaten yolks stirred straight into near-boiling milk will scramble in streaks. Temper them with a ladleful or two of the hot base first, return everything to the pan, and hold it at 175F for a minute or so before pulling it off the heat. Strain the finished custard through a sieve to catch any set egg.
- Weights into cups20 ounces of sugar is about 2 3/4 to 3 cups; 6 to 7 ounces of pearl tapioca is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups; 2 ounces of butter is half a stick. Twelve yolks or eight whole eggs probably assumes eggs somewhat smaller than today's large, so ten yolks or seven whole large eggs may be closer.
- TapiocaSmall pearl tapioca, not instant or minute tapioca, which is pre-cooked and will turn to paste. Large pearl still exists and the rolling-pin instruction stands: crush it, then sift out the powder so the custard does not go gluey.
- The cold steepTwo hours in cold milk set somewhere warm is not idleness — hydrated pearls cook evenly instead of staying chalky in the center. Do not skip it, and do not substitute a hot soak, which will make the outsides slime before the centers soften.
- Fifteen minutes is right hereUnusually for an old custard timing, this one is not overlong: pearl tapioca genuinely needs a quarter hour of gentle boiling to go clear. Stir the bottom constantly, since the starch and sugar together scorch readily.
- Freezing without a bucket freezerThe original assumes a hand-cranked churn packed with ice and salt. Chill the strained custard thoroughly, ideally overnight, then run it in a modern ice cream maker. The whipped cream goes in at the end of churning, exactly as written, and lightens what is otherwise a dense mixture.
- Texture on standingTapioca starch keeps the ice cream soft and slightly chewy, but the pearls firm up hard when fully frozen. Serve it within a day or two, and let it sit ten minutes out of the freezer before scooping.
- FlavoringVanilla extract stirred in cold, or lemon zest steeped in the hot milk and strained out. Add flavoring after cooling, as the recipe directs — long boiling drives off both.
Frozen custards thickened with a starch were a working pastry cook's economy: tapioca, cornstarch, or arrowroot stretched expensive cream and eggs while giving body that survived a long afternoon in the ice-packed freezer cabinet. Pearl tapioca, made from cassava starch and largely imported through Brazil and Southeast Asia, was a staple of American and British kitchens from the mid-nineteenth century onward, familiar mostly as boiled milk puddings — the "fish eyes in glue" of later schoolroom complaint. This formula is a large one, three quarts of milk and a dozen yolks, and it finishes with a cup of whipped cream folded in at the last moment.