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Peach Tapioca
1 can peaches 1/4 cup powdered sugar 1 cup tapioca Boiling water 1/2 cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt Drain peaches, sprinkle with powdered sugar, and let stand one hour; soak tapioca one hour in cold water to cover; to peach syrup add enough boiling water to make three cups; heat to boiling-point, add tapioca drained from cold water, sugar, and salt; then cook in a double boiler until transparent. Line a mould or pudding-dish with peaches cut in quarters, fill with tapioca, and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes; cool slightly, turn on a dish, and serve with Cream Sauce I.
A straightforward canned-fruit pudding that depends almost entirely on getting the tapioca fully cooked before it goes near the oven. A few of Farmer's quantities need a second look.
- Cook the tapioca until truly clearThis is the hinge. The pudding is baked only 30 minutes, which is not long enough to hydrate raw starch, so the tapioca must be transparent all the way through in the double boiler first; with soaked pearl tapioca that can take an hour or more. Any white centres left at that stage will stay gritty in the finished pudding.
- What kind of tapiocaFarmer means pearl tapioca, soaked before cooking. Small pearl works best. Do not substitute instant or "minute" tapioca measure for measure: it is pre-cooked and much finer, and a cup of it will set into a solid block.
- The saltOne and a half teaspoons for a pudding of this size is very high by modern taste and may be a typesetting error for half a teaspoon. Start with 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term meant finely ground sugar rather than specifically modern confectioners' sugar; either will work here. Its purpose is to draw juice from the drained peaches, and an hour is enough; the liquid it releases can go back into the syrup.
- Canned peaches then and nowPeriod cans were packed in heavy syrup. If you use fruit in juice or light syrup the pudding will be noticeably less sweet, and if you use heavy syrup you can cut the half cup of sugar back. Taste the syrup-and-water mixture before adding sugar.
- Oven temperature'Moderate oven' is usually read as roughly 350-375°F; the book gives no figures. The pudding is already cooked at this point; the baking is only to set it and marry it with the fruit.
- Turning it outButter the mould before lining it with peaches, let the baked pudding stand 10 to 15 minutes, then invert. Tapioca sets firmly as it cools, so a long rest makes it stiff and hard to release.
- Cream Sauce I and yieldThe sauce referred to is the sweet cream sauce from the pudding-sauce section — butter, sugar and cream — not a savoury white sauce. The recipe gives no yield; six servings is a fair guess.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, reached American kitchens as an import and was sold in pearls or flake form; it is often said to have become, by the 1890s, a standard cheap thickener for nursery and family puddings, valued because it was bland, digestible and stretched fruit a long way. This recipe belongs squarely to the moment when canned fruit became reliable and inexpensive enough for everyday cooking — opens a can without apology, something a mid-century cookbook would rarely have done — and it shows the Boston Cooking School method at work: soak, cook in a double boiler to a measurable visual endpoint, bake, unmould, serve with a named sauce from another page. The double boiler in particular is generally traced to school habit, understood as the safeguard against the scorching that ruins any starch pudding on direct heat.