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Tapioca Cream
1/4 cup pearl tapioca or 1½ tablespoons minute tapioca 2 cups scalded milk 1 teaspoon vanilla ¼ cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon vanilla Strain into buttered 2 eggs 1/3 cup sugar ¼ teaspoon salt Pick over tapioca and soak one hour in cold water to cover, drain, add to milk, and cook in double boiler until tapioca is transparent. Add half the sugar to milk and remainder to egg yolks slightly beaten, and salt. Combine by pouring hot mixture slowly on egg mixture, return to double boiler, and cook until it thickens. Remove from range and add whites of eggs beaten stiff. Chill and flavor.
A stovetop custard thickened with tapioca, cooked entirely in a double boiler and folded with beaten whites at the end. The hinge is heat control: once the yolks go in, the mixture must thicken below a simmer or it curdles.
- Pearl vs. minute tapiocaOld-style pearl tapioca is the large white bead that needs the hour-long soak and a long cook to turn clear. Minute (quick-cooking) tapioca is pre-cooked and granulated; it goes straight into the scalded milk with no soaking and needs only a short cook.
- Sugar and salt quantitiesRead the column as 1/3 cup sugar for 2 cups of milk, split between milk and yolks, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Several figures have lost their fractions, so read them as quarter- and third-cup measures rather than whole numbers; the extra vanilla, the 1/8 teaspoon salt and the "Strain into buttered" line appear to have strayed in from an adjacent custard recipe.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to just below the boil, until bubbles ring the edge of the pan, around 180F. It is not a boil, and boiling the milk here will only make skin.
- Cooking the custardAfter tempering, the mixture wants to reach roughly 170-175F, the point where it coats a spoon and a finger drawn across leaves a clean track. Water in the lower pan should stay at a bare shiver, not a rolling boil.
- TemperingPour the hot tapioca and milk into the yolks in a thin stream while whisking, not the reverse. Dumping the yolks into the hot pan gives you sweet scrambled egg suspended in tapioca.
- The beaten whitesThey are folded into the custard off the heat and are only partly cooked by the residual warmth. Anyone cooking for children, older or immunocompromised eaters should use pasteurized whites, or omit them and serve the custard plain.
- Flavoring lastThe vanilla goes in after the pudding has cooled, as the closing line says. Added to the hot custard, much of its aroma steams off.
- Chilling and yieldCover the surface with a buttered round of paper or plastic to stop a skin forming, and chill until set. The recipe gives no yield; 2 cups of milk will fill roughly four cups or small glass dishes.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese and Spanish traders to Africa and Asia; the pearl form reached American grocers as an imported shelf staple in the nineteenth century, sold alongside sago and arrowroot as an invalid food and a cheap thickener. The recipe, whose form points to Fannie Farmer's book, catches the moment of changeover: it gives both the old pearl tapioca, with its obligatory hour of soaking, and the newer "minute" granulated product that removed the soaking step and made the pudding a weeknight dessert. Tapioca cream is a boiled custard stretched with starch, cheaper and more forgiving than a straight cup custard, and it stayed on American tables well into the twentieth century largely on the strength of that convenience.