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Tapioca Custard Meringue
Make the tapioca pudding preceding. When baked spread over the top some lemon conserve or orange marmalade. Beat whatever whites are left over to a froth; add sugar, about an ounce to each white, lightly stirred in, and vanilla flavor. Make the top of the pudding baking-hot again, then spread on the meringue and dry-bake.
A finishing recipe rather than a standalone one: it assumes you already have the baked tapioca pudding from the previous page and a bowl of leftover whites from its yolks. The instructions worth translating are the ones about heat.
- The hinge: reheat the pudding firstSpreading meringue onto a cool or lukewarm pudding is what makes it weep and slide. Getting the surface "baking-hot again" sets the underside of the meringue on contact, which is why the direction is given at all.
- "Dry-bake" means low and slowNot a quick browning. The recipe gives no temperature; a modern equivalent would be a slow oven, in the region of 275-300F, until the meringue is firm to the touch and only faintly coloured. A hot oven would colour the peaks before the interior set.
- An ounce of sugar per whiteThat is about 2 tablespoons, or 28g — a soft meringue ratio, roughly half the sugar of a hard meringue shell. The recipe says only to beat the whites to a froth and stir the sugar in lightly; do not work it in hard or you will knock the air out.
- Lemon conserveA thick lemon preserve, closer to a stiff marmalade than to a pourable sauce. Use anything that will hold its place under the meringue rather than soak into the pudding.
- TapiocaThe preceding pudding most likely used pearl or flake tapioca, soaked before baking. Instant or minute tapioca hydrates differently; if substituting, follow the package hydration rather than the old soaking times.
- Vanilla flavorNineteenth-century bakery vanilla was an extract of variable strength. A teaspoon of modern extract for three or four whites is ample.
- YieldNo quantity is given because the recipe simply uses whatever whites are left over from the pudding. As a rough guide, three whites will cover a 9-inch dish generously; two will do a shallow one.
Tapioca reached American kitchens as a cheap imported starch — pearls milled from cassava root, shipped largely from Brazil and the East Indies — and it became a common economy pudding in the later nineteenth century, where it stretched milk and eggs a long way. The recipe is plainly a thrift recipe: the meringue exists because the pudding used yolks, and the whites would otherwise be wasted. It assumes a kitchen in which a pan of tapioca pudding, a jar of marmalade and a bowl of leftover whites are all to hand.