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Apple Tapioca
3/4 cup pearl or 1/2 cup minute tapioca Cold water 2½ cups boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt 7 sour apples 1/2 cup sugar Soak tapioca one hour in cold water to cover, drain, add boiling water and salt; cook in double boiler until transparent. Core and pare apples, arrange in buttered puddingdish, fill cavities with sugar, pour over tapioca, and bake in moderate oven until apples are soft. Serve with sugar and cream or Cream Sauce I. Minute Tapioca requires no soaking.
A Fannie Farmer standard: whole cored apples baked under a blanket of tapioca. The recipe is forgiving, but the tapioca and the apples need different handling than the terse wording suggests.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" in books of this period is usually read as about 350 to 375F. Expect 40 to 60 minutes, depending on the variety and size of the apples; they are done when a skewer slides through without resistance.
- Pearl tapiocaThe large pearl tapioca of 1896 is still sold in Asian groceries and some bulk shops. It genuinely needs the hour-long cold soak and then cooking in the double boiler until each pearl is clear with no white center at its core — usually 30 to 45 minutes. Undercooked pearls stay chalky and will not soften further in the oven.
- "Minute tapioca"This was a branded quick-cooking tapioca, one of the earliest such convenience products. Modern quick-cooking tapioca works in the same 1/2 cup measure but thickens faster; give it about 10 minutes in the double boiler and watch that it does not set solid before it goes over the apples.
- Double boilerNot fussiness. Tapioca scorches and sticks over direct heat, and the starch clouds and turns gluey if stirred hard. Use a heatproof bowl over simmering water and stir only occasionally.
- "Sour apples"A firm tart cooking apple — Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy. Sweet dessert apples collapse into sauce and leave the pudding watery.
- Coring wholeCore from the stem end without cutting through the base, so the cavity holds its sugar. An apple corer or a melon baller does this cleanly; seven apples want a dish large enough that they sit in one layer without touching.
- ConsistencyThe cooked tapioca should pour, not mound. If it has stiffened while the apples were being prepared, loosen it with a few spoonfuls of boiling water before pouring it over.
- YieldSeven apples serves six to seven. Best warm rather than hot; tapioca sets as it cools and is unpleasantly stiff straight from the refrigerator.
Tapioca is starch extracted from the cassava root, imported into nineteenth-century American kitchens from Brazil and the West Indies and sold either as large pearls or, by the late nineteenth century, in granulated and flake forms that were said to spare cooks the long soak. Puddings like this one belong to a whole family of cheap starch desserts — sago, arrowroot, cornstarch, rice — that let a household stretch fruit and a little sugar into a hot dish for the end of a meal. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives tapioca its own cluster of recipes in the hot pudding section, and the parenthetical note that "Minute Tapioca requires no soaking" is a small record of the moment a convenience product entered the standard American kitchen, still new enough to need explaining. The instruction to fill the apple cavities with sugar rather than sweetening the tapioca is the sensible part: the fruit's own juice dissolves it into syrup in the bottom of the dish.