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Newton Tapioca
5 tablespoons pearl tapioca 4 cups scalded milk 4 tablespoons Indian meal 1 cup milk ¾ cup molasses 3 tablespoons butter 1½ teaspoons salt Soak tapioca two hours in cold water to cover. Pour scalded milk over Indian meal and cook in double boiler ten minutes. Add tapioca drained from water, molasses, butter and salt; turn into buttered pudding-dish, and pour over remaining milk, but do not stir. Bake one and onefourth hours in a moderate oven.
A tapioca-and-cornmeal version of Indian pudding, baked slowly and finished with a layer of milk poured over the top. Two details carry the dish: the tapioca must be soaked in advance, and the last cup of milk must not be stirred in.
- Pearl tapioca, not instantThis calls for small pearl tapioca, which needs the full two-hour cold soak to hydrate; instant or quick-cooking tapioca will dissolve and give a gluey pudding. Drain it well before adding.
- Indian mealNineteenth-century American term for cornmeal. Use a fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not corn flour.
- MolassesThe molasses is three-quarters of a cup, as the printed page gives it. Use unsulphured dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which turns bitter over a long bake.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken to mean somewhere around 350F. At an hour and a quarter the pudding should be set at the edges and still slightly loose at the center.
- Do not stir the last cupThe reserved cup of milk floats on the surface and sinks slowly as the pudding bakes, producing the soft, whey-like layer that distinguishes a baked Indian pudding. Stirring it in gives an even, dull custard instead.
- Scalding the milkBring the four cups just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, then pour over the meal. Scalding shortens the double-boiler time.
- Double boilerTen minutes over simmering water thickens the meal without scorching it, which happens readily over direct heat. A heavy saucepan on low heat works if stirred constantly.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 2-quart baking dish is about right; the pudding rises very little. It serves six to eight, traditionally warm with cream or a hard sauce.
Indian pudding was one of the oldest sweet dishes in New England cookery, born of cornmeal and molasses in a region where wheat flour and refined sugar were expensive and both maize and West Indian molasses were not. By the later nineteenth century the plain cornmeal-and-molasses pudding had spawned a family of variations, and Newton Tapioca is one of them: tapioca pearls, a starch extracted from cassava that had appeared in American cookbooks by the middle of the nineteenth century, lighten the heavy meal and give the pudding a slightly translucent body. The origin of the name is not explained in the book. The undisturbed cup of milk poured over the top is the authentically old part of the method, and it survives in Indian pudding recipes still.