Home › To Stew Tapioca › To Stew Tapioca
To Stew Tapioca
100 1226. To make a breakfast-cupful, take a small teacup of tapioca, soak it for ten minutes in cold water, let it simmer very gently about an hour (adding a little more water if it become too thick), then add milk enough to make it a proper thickness, and warm it altogether, stirring it all the time: flavour with sugar, nutmeg, lemon, or wine as may be approved.
BAKED FLOUR (Infants' food). 1227. Put a basin of flour with a paper tied over it, into the
A plain nursery-and-invalid tapioca, thickened with water first and milk only at the end. The instructions are workable as written; the main adjustments are to the tapioca itself, which is not the product sold under that name in most shops today.
- Which tapiocaThe recipe assumes small pearl tapioca, which needs long soaking and slow simmering. Instant or quick-cooking tapioca will dissolve to paste in a fraction of the time, and the large boba-style pearls sold now behave differently again. If you use small pearl, soak it far longer than ten minutes -- an hour or more, or overnight -- for an even set.
- QuantitiesA small teacup is roughly 5-6 fl oz by volume; a breakfast-cup perhaps 8-10 fl oz. The two figures are hard to reconcile, since pearl tapioca swells to several times its dry volume, so treat the measures as approximate and expect rather more than one cupful.
- Simmer means barely movingThe hinge of the dish. Tapioca starch scorches on the bottom of the pan and turns stringy if it boils. Keep the surface just trembling, use a heavy pan, and stir up from the base every few minutes.
- Adding the milkMilk goes in only at the end, and the mixture is warmed rather than boiled again. Reboiling milk with swollen starch tends to give a gluey, skinned texture.
- An hour is not excessiveAn hour of gentle cooking is not unreasonable for pearl tapioca, though small pearls that have soaked well may go translucent sooner. Cook until the grains show no white core.
- FlavouringThe recipe leaves the point of addition open; sugar and nutmeg are most easily stirred in with the milk. Lemon means the pared zest or a little juice. 'Wine' in a dish of this kind was most likely a fortified wine such as sherry or madeira, best added at the end.
- ServingIntended warm, in a cup; the recipe's own 'breakfast-cupful' and the neighbouring infants' food point to nursery and sickroom use. It thickens considerably on standing, so loosen with a little more milk if you hold it.