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Tapioca Custard Pudding
3/4 pound of tapioca. 3 pints of milk. 6 ounces of sugar. 3 ounces of butter. 8 yolks and 2 whole eggs, Salt. Grated lemon rind or other flavor. Sift the dust from tapioca. Sometimes it is better to wash it, besides, like rice. Soak it in half the milk about two hours in a warm place. Boil the rest of the milk with the sugar in it--the sugar prevents burning at bottom--cook the soaked tapioca in it about half an hour. Beat the eggs, mix all together and bake only till the puddings are just set in the middle, lest the custard in it curdle and separate instead of being creamy rich. Any hot, clear, transparent sauce or lemon syrup suits, also brandy and wine sauces. This pudding is often served cold with sweetened cream. Also may be cut cold in shapes, egged, breaded, and fried as fritters.
Does it seem like extravagance to call for so many yolks of eggs for puddings? Is is not. What might be so regarded in private house work is really the greatest economy in hotels where each fresh meal is required to be as good as the one that preceded it, and the whites of eggs left over are needed in a hundred ways. The whites do no more good in puddings than so much flour or starch. The yolks give the richness and fine color. Probably at another time we shall have a talk about silver cakes, snow cakes and a dozen others made with white of eggs, white cocoanut pies, white whips and floats, and the meringues must not be forgot.
A hotel-scale baked custard thickened with tapioca, written for a cook turning out a dozen portions at a time. The proportions scale down cleanly by half or a quarter.
- The hinge: bake it gently and stop earlyThis is a custard carrying tapioca, not a starch pudding. The recipe specifies no oven heat; a slow oven (around 325F in modern terms), and a water bath if you want insurance, will suit it. Pull it when the centre still trembles; carryover heat finishes it. Past that point the eggs tighten and weep, which is exactly the curdling the author warns against.
- What tapioca meant hereAlmost certainly pearl or flake tapioca, sold dusty and unwashed, which is why the recipe says to sift and rinse it and soak it two hours. Modern small pearl tapioca is clean and soaks in about 30 minutes; instant or minute tapioca is pre-cooked and will turn to paste under this treatment. Do not substitute it.
- Yield3/4 lb tapioca, 3 pints milk and 10 eggs' worth of yolk makes a large quantity of pudding, enough for a dozen or more servings. A quarter batch (3 oz tapioca, 1.5 cups milk, 2 yolks plus a half egg's worth of beaten whole egg) fits an ordinary baking dish.
- Salt and flavouringUnspecified, as was normal. About a teaspoon of salt for the full batch, the grated rind of two lemons, or a split vanilla bean steeped in the boiling milk.
- Warm place for soakingHotel kitchens of the period commonly had a warm shelf on or near the range. Two hours at room temperature in milk is fine now; if the kitchen is cold, soak in the refrigerator and allow longer rather than leaving dairy standing warm.
- The half-hour cookSimmer the soaked tapioca in the sweetened milk until the pearls are translucent with no chalky centre — usually 20 to 30 minutes, stirring, since tapioca settles and scorches. Let it cool to warm before the eggs go in, or they will scramble on contact.
- The fritter variationChill the baked pudding solid overnight, cut in squares or rounds, then egg, crumb and shallow-fry. It only works if the pudding is set firm, which argues for the full quantity of tapioca and a thorough chill.
- Leftover whitesThe author's economy argument assumes you will use them the same day. Whites keep four days refrigerated and freeze well; two whites weigh about 2 oz if you are working from a recipe by weight.
Tapioca is the washed starch of the cassava root, shipped to American ports from Brazil and the East Indies and sold as "pearls" — droplets of moistened starch dried on hot plates. By the 1880s it was a staple of the boarding-house and hotel pantry: cheap, shelf-stable, and capable of giving body to a custard without the flour taste of a cornstarch pudding. This recipe comes from the hotel-kitchen literature generally associated with Jessup Whitehead, a Chicago writer whose books were addressed to professional cooks rather than housewives, which explains both the three-pint scale and the digression on egg economy. The argument he makes — that a hotel uses whites in meringues, silver cakes and whips faster than it uses yolks, so yolk-heavy puddings are thrift rather than luxury — is a fair snapshot of how a large kitchen balanced its books before commercial egg products existed.