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Tapioca Wine Jelly
1089. Take a quarter of a pound of tapioca, and wash it in two or three waters; then add a pint of cold water, and let it soak twelve hours or more; simmer it in the same water with the rind of a lemon until it becomes quite clear; then add the juice of the lemon, with wine and loaf sugar to taste, and put it in the mould at once.
A starch-set jelly rather than a gelatine one: the tapioca itself does all the thickening, so the texture depends entirely on cooking the grains until they turn glassy. Everything else is seasoning.
- The hinge: cook until clearThe tapioca must simmer until every grain has lost its white opaque centre. A chalky core means raw starch, which will taste of flour and set into a grainy mass rather than a smooth jelly.
- Use pearl tapiocaThe washing in two or three waters and the reliance on grains turning clear point to whole pearl tapioca rather than instant, minute tapioca or tapioca flour. The recipe does not specify a pearl size. Pre-cooked instant granules would break down over a twelve-hour soak.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter pound is 4 oz, roughly 3/4 cup of small pearls. The pint is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz or 2 1/2 US cups; with pearls this size the ratio matters more than the exact vessel.
- SoakingTwelve hours at cool room temperature suited an unheated larder; in a warm kitchen soak in the refrigerator instead. The pearls will take up a good deal of the water, so simmering "in the same water" begins with a thick, sluggish mixture. Loosen with a little extra water if it catches.
- The lemon rindPare it in wide strips with no white pith, and lift the strips out before adding the juice. Left in, the pith turns the jelly bitter as it stands.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent. Start with about 2 oz and taste, since the wine contributes sweetness too.
- Wine to tasteThe recipe specifies only "wine"; in dishes of this kind a fortified wine such as sherry, madeira or port is the likely intention. Add it off the heat at the end, as the recipe directs, or the aroma cooks away; quantity is left to taste.
- Moulding and yield"At once" is meant literally, as the mixture begins to set as it cools. Rinse the mould with cold water first to help it turn out. Best eaten within a day, since starch jellies weep and stiffen with keeping.
Tapioca, the washed starch of the cassava root, was reaching British kitchens as a colonial import by around the turn of the nineteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth was familiar on the invalid tray and in the nursery as a light, easily digested starch. Wine jellies belonged to the same medicinal-genteel category: a little sherry or port stirred into something bland was common convalescent fare, and cookery books of the period sometimes group such dishes with the gruels and beef teas rather than with the puddings. What distinguishes this version is that it needs no isinglass or calf's foot, both of which were expensive or laborious, and the same economy may explain the long cold soak, which softened the pearls with time rather than fuel.