Home › Recipes › Tapioca Cake, with Apple Jelly
Tapioca Cake, with Apple Jelly
3/4 pound of tapioca. 3 pints of milk, or milk and water. 4 ounces of sugar. 2 ounces of butter. 10 yolks, or else 3 whole eggs. Orange flavoring. Salt. Soak the tapioca an hour or two in half the milk. Boil the rest of the milk with the sugar and salt in it; stir in the tapioca and let cook gently half an hour. Then beat in the butter, eggs and flavoring and bake like rice cake, an inch deep.
A baked tapioca custard cut in squares rather than a cake in any leavened sense. The title promises apple jelly, though the text never returns to it — the jelly is the finish, spread over the top or served beside each square.
- Use real pearl tapioca3/4 lb is roughly 2 cups of small pearl tapioca. Instant or "minute" tapioca is pre-gelatinised and will not behave the same way through a long soak and simmer; it is not a substitute here.
- The soak is not optionalAn hour or two in 3 cups of cold milk hydrates the pearls so they cook evenly. Skipped, the centres stay chalky no matter how long the pudding bakes.
- Measures3 pints is 6 cups; 4 oz sugar is about 1/2 cup; 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons. Salt is unmeasured — half a teaspoon suits this volume.
- EggsTen yolks and three whole eggs are not equivalent in richness, though the recipe offers them as straight alternatives and does not say what the difference in the finished dish will be.
- Temper the eggsThe recipe says only to beat in the butter, eggs and flavoring after the half-hour cooking, without specifying that the pan comes off the heat. Beat a ladle of the hot mixture into the eggs first, then return it, or the yolks may scramble.
- Orange flavoringMost likely orange-flower water or an oil-based orange extract rather than juice. Half a teaspoon of orange-flower water, or the zest of one orange steeped in the boiling milk and strained out, will answer.
- "Bake like rice cake, an inch deep"No oven temperature is given; the direction assumes the reader knows the rice version. Bake in a buttered shallow pan filled one inch deep and stop when set with a faint wobble at the centre. Note that this quantity will need more than a single 9x13 at that depth.
- The jellyThe text never returns to the apple jelly of the title, so no method is given. Warming it to loosen and brushing it over the cooled cake, or serving it alongside, are the obvious readings.
- YieldTwelve to sixteen squares or more, depending on the pan. It cuts cleanly only when fully cold.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, reached American kitchens through the tropical trade and was sold as pearls, flake or flour; by the late nineteenth century it sat beside sago and cornstarch in the pantry as a cheap, reliable thickener. The instruction to "bake like rice cake" assumes the reader already knows the rice version and needs only the substitution. Apple jelly as the finish fits a general habit of glazing plain baked puddings with a clear preserve, apple being abundant and neutral. The alternative of ten yolks or three whole eggs may reflect a bakeshop's surplus of yolks left from whipping whites, though the book does not say so.