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Tapioca Custard Pudding
4 cups scalded milk 1/2 cup sugar 2/3 cup pearl or 1/3 cup minute tapioca 1 teaspoon salt 3 eggs 1 tablespoon butter Soak tapioca one hour in cold water to cover, drain, add to milk, and cook in double boiler thirty minutes; beat eggs slightly, add sugar and salt, pour on gradually hot mixture, turn into buttered pudding-dish, add butter, bake thirty minutes in slow oven.
A baked tapioca custard in the Fannie Farmer manner: the starch is cooked soft first, then bound with egg and set in the oven. Everything hinges on keeping the egg below the temperature at which it curdles.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300-325F by the usual modern equivalence. Custard baked much hotter than this tends to weep and turn grainy however carefully it was mixed.
- Use a water bathThe recipe does not call for one, but in a modern dry oven you can stand the pudding-dish in a larger pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides; the custard will set more evenly and stay smooth.
- Tempering the eggs"Pour on gradually" is the whole technique. Add the hot tapioca-milk to the beaten eggs a ladle at a time, whisking, or you will have sweet scrambled egg suspended in starch.
- Tapioca typesPearl tapioca means the large old-style beads, which genuinely need the hour-long cold soak. "Minute" tapioca is the fine quick-cooking granules still sold today; it needs no soaking and roughly 10-15 minutes in the double boiler rather than thirty.
- Scalded milkBring the milk just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, about 180F. Whole milk gives the body the recipe expects; skim milk sets thin.
- The saltA full teaspoon for four cups of milk reads high to a modern palate. Half a teaspoon is closer to current practice, and the pudding will still taste seasoned rather than flat.
- DonenessThirty minutes is a starting point. The pudding is done when the edges are set and the center still trembles slightly; a knife inserted an inch from the rim should come out clean. It firms further as it cools.
- YieldFour cups of milk and three eggs make roughly a 1 1/2-quart pudding, about six to eight servings. Good warm with cream, or cold the next day.
Tapioca is the starch washed from the root of cassava, and by the late nineteenth century it reached American kitchens as dried "pearls" shipped from Brazil and the East Indies, sold alongside sago and arrowroot as one of the light, digestible starches recommended for invalids and children. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives it a whole cluster of puddings because the pearls were cheap, kept indefinitely in a jar, and stretched milk and eggs into a filling dessert. The alternative measurement for "minute tapioca" is a small dating clue: quick-cooking granules, ground rather than left as whole beads, were a commercial innovation of around the turn of the century, and Fannie Farmer accommodates both the old beads that demand an hour's soak and the new product that does not.