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Steamed Tapioca Pudding, with Custard Sauce
1 pound of tapioca. 3 pints of milk. 1/2 pound of sugar. 3 ounces of butter. 6 yolks of eggs. 3 whole eggs. Salt. 1 lemon, juice and grated rind. Soak the tapioca in most of the milk in a warm place 2 hours. Then boil the remaining milk with the salt, sugar and butter; turn in the soaked tapioca, let simmer 15 minutes with the steam shut in; then beat in the eggs and lemon. Butter two moulds, put in the mixture, and steam one and one-half hours. STEAMED SAGO PUDDING. STEAMED GROUND RICE PUDDING. STEAMED FARINA PUDDING. These can all be made by the foregoing receipt, but of farina use 2 ounces less, as it absorbs more liquid than the other substances. Enough has been said about rice cakes and timbales to dismiss the subject, but here is the same thing done in tapioca.
A bakery-scale steamed pudding: a pound of tapioca and three pints of milk fill two quart moulds and will serve twelve to sixteen. Halving it works cleanly.
- The hinge: soak, then don't rush the simmerThe two-hour warm soak is what makes the pearls cook through without turning to glue. Skipping it leaves hard centres that no amount of steaming will soften.
- What kind of tapiocaThis means pearl tapioca, small pearls rather than the large boba sort, or old-style flake tapioca. Instant or "minute" tapioca is pre-gelatinised and will collapse into paste during the soak; do not substitute it.
- UnitsThree pints is 6 cups (1.4 L). Half a pound of sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; 3 ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons. "Salt" unspecified — a rounded half teaspoon suits this volume.
- "With the steam shut in"Simply means lid on the pan for the 15-minute simmer, so the milk is not lost to evaporation. Stir the base often; tapioca settles and scorches on a thin pan bottom.
- Adding the eggs and lemonLet the thickened tapioca cool for a few minutes before beating in the nine yolks' worth of egg, or they will scramble. Add the lemon juice last, off the heat — acid stirred into hot milk encourages curdling.
- Steaming the mouldsButter the moulds well, fill no more than three-quarters full, cover each with buttered foil or a cloth tied down, and set on a rack in a covered pot with water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up; 90 minutes at a hard boil will make the pudding coarse and full of holes.
- Doneness and unmouldingA skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel set rather than liquid at the middle. Rest 10 minutes before turning out, or it will slump.
- The substitutionsFarina here means a fine wheat meal; the nearest modern product is Cream of Wheat, with semolina a coarser relative, and the note to use 2 ounces less follows from its greater absorbency. Sago is the palm-starch pearl, close to tapioca in behaviour; "ground rice" is a coarse rice meal, and rice flour will stand in here.
- The custard saucePromised in the title but not given on this page. A plain pouring custard — roughly 6 yolks and 2 ounces sugar to a pint of milk, cooked to 175–180F and strained — is the right weight for it.
Tapioca, sago, farina and ground rice were all in common use in nineteenth-century pastry work, and books of this kind often treat them as interchangeable by weight — which is what the closing note does, adjusting only for farina's greater thirst. Tapioca comes from cassava root and sago from the pith of palms; both were imported goods that had become ordinary grocery items in American cities by this period. Steaming rather than baking suited a mould that had to be turned out whole and sliced, since the gentle even heat sets the egg without browning or cracking the surface — the same logic behind steamed plum pudding. The brisk closing dismissal ("Enough has been said about rice cakes and timbales") suggests a book addressed to readers assumed to know the technique already.