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Tapioca Wine Soup
1/3 cup pearl tapioca 1 cup cold water 3 cups boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt 3-inch piece stick cinnamon 1 pint claret wine 1/2 cup powdered sugar Soak tapioca in cold water two hours. Drain, add to boiling water with salt and cinnamon; let boil three minutes, then cook in double boiler until tapioca is transparent. Cool, add wine and sugar. Serve very cold. 1 can corn
A cold sweet wine soup, closer to a chilled dessert than a first course. Two details matter most: the wine is never cooked, so its quality is what you taste, and the tapioca must be fully transparent before it leaves the heat or it will stay chalky no matter how long it chills.
- Ignore the last line"1 can corn" appears to be the opening ingredient of the next recipe, carried over from the original page. It has nothing to do with this soup.
- Pearl tapiocaThis means true pearl tapioca, the opaque white beads, not the instant granulated kind and not boba. Instant tapioca cannot be substituted at the same volume; it will thicken to paste within minutes.
- Time in the double boilerReckon on roughly an hour after the initial three-minute boil, depending on the pearls and how well they soaked. They are done when there is no white dot left in the centre of any bead. Undercooked tapioca does not soften later in the refrigerator.
- Powdered sugarIn this book powdered sugar means finely ground granulated sugar, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Use superfine or ordinary granulated; the cornstarch in confectioners' sugar will cloud the soup.
- ClaretAn American term of the period for a dry red Bordeaux or something in that style. A light, dry, unoaked red works best; anything jammy or high in alcohol will overwhelm the cinnamon. A pint is two cups.
- Add the wine coldCool the tapioca base before the wine goes in, as the recipe directs. Stirred into a hot base, much of the wine's aroma is driven off, and that fresh fruit character is the point of the dish.
- The cinnamonFish the stick out before chilling; left in, the spice can turn harsh.
- Texture on standingTapioca sets up considerably as it cools and the pearls sink. Stir well before serving and thin with a little cold water if it has gone to pudding.
- Yield and servingRoughly five to six cups, serving six in small bowls or cups. It is served very cold, as a first course or as a dessert, and the wine in it is uncooked.
Sweet wine and fruit soups are often said to have come into American cookbooks by way of northern European practice, where cold or warm fruit soups thickened with sago, tapioca or rice have long been served as a course in their own right. Recipes of this kind are generally filed among the soups without stock, a chapter that would plausibly suit a chilled wine soup, which needs no stockpot going all day. Pearl tapioca, a starch extracted from cassava root and pearled, imported in quantity by the late nineteenth century, was cheap, kept indefinitely in the pantry, and gave a genteel translucent body without eggs or cream. "Claret" here is the old English and American name for red Bordeaux, used loosely by this date for almost any dry red wine of that general character.