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Daffodil Meringue
2 Rounding Tablespoons Granulated Tapioca 1 Pint Boiling Water 3 Eggs 1/2 Cup Honey 2 Tablespoons Lemon Juice 1 Tablespoon Butter Pinch Salt Moisten the granulated tapioca with cold water and stir it into the boiling water. Salt lightly and cook until clear.
Beat the yolks of the eggs and beat in the honey with the lemon juice and butter. Add this gradually to the tapioca and cook over hot water until it thickens-about 20 minutes. Pour into a buttered dish, adding a little candied lemon peel if desired. Cover with a meringue made from the whites of the eggs beaten with 3 tablespoons of honey, and bake to a delicate fawn color.
A lemon-honey tapioca custard under a honey meringue. It is straightforward, but two things have changed since it was written: the tapioca on the shelf and the behaviour of a meringue sweetened with honey rather than sugar.
- Granulated tapiocaThis is the old milled product, coarser than today's "instant" or "minute" tapioca and finer than pearl. Quick-cooking tapioca is the closest substitute and needs no soaking; if you use small pearl tapioca, soak it in cold water an hour first or it will stay chalky in the centre.
- "Cook until clear"This is the real test, not the clock. The grains go from opaque white to translucent with a faint dot at the core; pull it when the dots have just disappeared. Tapioca pulled too early may not soften fully in the custard stage.
- A pint of boiling waterTwo cups. The mixture looks alarmingly thin at this stage and thickens only after the yolks go in and it sits over the water bath.
- "Over hot water"A double boiler, or a bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water not touching the base. With three yolks and no starch beyond the tapioca, direct heat will scramble them. Twenty minutes is realistic; stir often.
- Honey in place of sugarHoney is roughly 17 to 18 percent water and more acidic than sugar, so both the custard and the meringue tend to set softer than their sugar equivalents. A honey meringue is unlikely to crisp, and it weeps more readily on standing.
The name follows a convention of calling a dish daffodil when it set yellow yolks against white beaten whites - daffodil cake, the yellow-and-white relative of angel food, is the best-known example. Tapioca, the starch extracted from cassava root, reached American kitchens in quantity through the nineteenth century and became a staple of the pudding chapter because it was cheap, kept well in the pantry and thickened without eggs or cream. The use of honey rather than sugar throughout is the more telling detail: honey-sweetened puddings and cakes appear with some frequency in American cookbooks of the 1910s, when sugar was scarce and conservation campaigns urged householders to substitute honey, molasses and corn syrup where they could. A book aimed at a young woman setting up a first household would have carried such economies as a matter of course.