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Tapioca Pudding
846. Soak two table-spoonsful of tapioca in a quart of cold milk for four hours, mix with it two eggs well beaten, two ounces of sugar, and a little grated lemon-peel; let it boil, stirring it all the time to prevent the eggs from turning the milk. Bake it in a dish for half an hour; one egg is enough for common purposes.
A very loose Victorian milk pudding: two tablespoons of tapioca to a quart of milk gives something closer to a thin baked custard than the stiff pudding modern readers expect. The hinge is heat control on the stovetop — the eggs go in before the pot goes on the fire, so it must be brought only to the edge of a boil.
- Use pearl tapiocaThis means pearl tapioca, which wants a long cold soak to swell and cook through. Instant or minute tapioca will dissolve to slime under this treatment, and cassava flour is not a substitute.
- Do not actually boil it"Let it boil, stirring it all the time to prevent the eggs from turning the milk" is the author warning you about curdling in the same breath as risking it. Bring the mixture to a bare steam, around 175-180F, stirring constantly, and pull it off as soon as it thickens enough to coat the spoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 325-350F; half an hour at that heat will set the top and finish the pearls, and a shallow dish sets faster than a deep one.
- Proportions are thin by modern tasteTwo tablespoons of tapioca to a quart of milk (an imperial quart, nearer five US cups than four) yields a pourable pudding. For something spoonable rather than sippable, expect to want three to four times the tapioca, though that changes the dish from what is written here.
- Two ounces of sugarAbout a quarter cup, which is restrained. Milk puddings of this kind were often mildly sweet nursery and sickroom food rather than a rich dessert.
- "One egg is enough for common purposes"The second egg is the richer version, the first the everyday one; the recipe does not say for whom. With one egg in a quart of milk the set will be very soft indeed.
- Lemon peelGrate only the coloured zest; the white pith turns bitter in a long-cooked milk pudding. A strip of peel steeped in the milk during the soak and then removed is a cleaner method.
- YieldA quart of milk plus eggs serves six as a light pudding, four generously.
Tapioca reached British kitchens as an import -- starch extracted from cassava root, shipped in dried pearls and treated much as cooks already treated sago, rice and semolina. By the mid-nineteenth century all four appeared almost interchangeably in the milk-pudding pages of household books, cheap, bland and thought suitable for children, invalids and anyone with a delicate stomach. The note that one egg will do "for common purposes" marks an everyday version against a richer one; the recipe does not say who each was for. The instruction to stir constantly so the eggs do not turn the milk is familiar Victorian custard practice, written for a cook working over a range whose heat was managed by moving the pot rather than turning it down.