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Apple Tapioca Pudding
Pare and core enough apples to fill dish; put into each apple bit of lemon peel. Soak one-half pint tapioca in one quart lukewarm water one hour, add a little salt; flavor with lemon; pour over apples. Bake until apples are tender.
Serve cold with cream and sugar.
A straightforward baked pudding whose success hinges almost entirely on the tapioca you buy and the apples you choose. The original assumes both in ways a modern shopper cannot.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe hour-long soak only makes sense for old-fashioned pearl or small-pearl tapioca, which must absorb water before it will cook through. Instant or minute tapioca dissolves into paste under these conditions and should not be substituted.
- The measuresHalf a pint of tapioca is one cup by volume; a quart of water is four cups. That is a generous ratio, and the mixture should look thin and milky before it goes into the oven — it thickens considerably as it bakes.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent; the pudding wants gentle, even heat so the tapioca clears before the top browns.
- TimingReckon on 45 to 60 minutes, depending on apple size. The pudding is done when the tapioca beads have gone from opaque white to translucent and a knife slips into an apple without resistance.
- Choosing applesPick a variety that holds its shape — Braeburn, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Modern dessert apples bred for sweetness and softness will collapse into the tapioca long before the starch has cooked.
- Lemon peelUse pared zest with as little white pith as possible, one strip tucked into each cored cavity, plus a little more zest or juice stirred through the tapioca. Remove the strips before serving; they will have given up their oil and turned leathery.
- Salt and sweetening"A little salt" means about half a teaspoon for this quantity. Note that no sugar goes into the pudding itself — all the sweetening arrives at the table, so the baked dish will taste austere straight from the oven.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no dish size — apples 'enough to fill dish' — so yield depends on the dish you use; allow for a quart of soaked tapioca poured over the apples. It is meant to be eaten cold, when the tapioca has set to a soft jelly around each apple; warm, it is loose and much less appealing.
Tapioca, the starch extracted from cassava root, reached American kitchens as a cheap imported thickener in the nineteenth century and was used for exactly this kind of dish: a pudding that stretched a few apples and a spoonful of cream into a family dessert without eggs, butter or much sugar. Whole baked apples suspended in a clear starch jelly were a fixture of late-Victorian and Edwardian household cookery. It is a beginner's pudding, requiring no custard to curdle and no pastry to handle. The instruction to serve it cold with cream assumes a household with a cool larder and a reliable milk supply.