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Tapioca Pudding
Cover three tablespoons tapioca with water; stand over night; add one quart milk, a small piece of butter, a little salt, and boil; beat the yolks of three eggs with a cup of sugar, and boil the whole to a very thick custard, flavor with vanilla; when cold cover with whites of eggs beaten.
A stirred custard thickened with tapioca and finished with meringue. The instruction to "boil the whole" is the one place the recipe will mislead you.
- Never actually boil the custardOnce the egg yolks go in, hold the mixture at 170-180F, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon. A true boil curdles the yolks and you get sweet scrambled egg suspended in tapioca. Recipes of this period often direct a "boil" where a bare tremble at the edge of the pan is all the mixture will stand.
- Which tapiocaThe overnight soak indicates small pearl tapioca; that soak is what makes the pearls swell and go translucent. Modern quick-cooking or minute tapioca needs no soaking at all and will dissolve to paste if given one. Three tablespoons of pearl tapioca in a quart of milk gives a loose, spoonable pudding, not a set one.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks and sugar together, then whisk a ladle of the hot milk into them before returning everything to the pan. Adding cold beaten yolks straight to hot milk is the usual cause of a grainy custard.
- SugarA full cup to a quart of milk is very sweet by current taste. Half to two-thirds of a cup gives a custard that still reads as dessert.
- The uncooked meringueAs written, the beaten whites are simply spread over the cold pudding and served raw. If you want that finish, use pasteurized whites, or pile the meringue on and brown it in a 400F oven for 8-10 minutes; the recipe itself gives no baking instruction.
- Butter and salt"A small piece of butter" is about a tablespoon and "a little salt" a scant quarter teaspoon. Neither is optional filler; the salt is what keeps a milk-and-sugar pudding from tasting flat.
- YieldA quart of milk makes roughly six servings. Chill at least three hours before topping, and press plastic wrap onto the surface if you want to avoid a skin.
Tapioca is starch extracted from the cassava root, shipped to nineteenth-century American and British kitchens as dried pearls and sold alongside sago, arrowroot and cornstarch as one of the cheap, keepable thickeners a household was expected to have on hand. Because the raw root is toxic until processed, the pearls arriving in grocers' bins represented a considerable amount of tropical labour, though cookbooks of the period rarely mention it. Puddings of this kind — milk, eggs, a starch, a meringue lid — filled whole chapters in domestic manuals because they used up milk, stretched a few eggs, and could be assembled around other work: the overnight soak here is a bit of kitchen scheduling as much as technique. A bride's cookbook is exactly where you would expect it, being forgiving, inexpensive, and respectable enough to put in front of company.</response>}</json_schema_note>}}</response>}</response>