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Apple Tapioca
One-half pint of pearl tapioca. Cover with one and one-half pints of cold water and soak for half an hour. Cook in double boiler until transparent. Pare and core a halfdozen apples, place in a baking-dish, pour over them the tapioca, cover and bake in a moderate oven or until the apples are perfectly tender. For the last ten minutes remove the cover that the surface of the pudding may brown slightly.
Fresh fruits such as peaches, apricots, pears, etc. may be substituted .
Dried fruits may also be used, when previously soaked but not cooked .
A plain baked tapioca that leans entirely on the fruit, so the two things worth attention are the tapioca's hydration and the fact that the recipe never mentions sugar.
- The measurementsA half pint of pearl tapioca is one cup; the pint and a half of cold water is three cups. Measure the tapioca dry, before soaking, since it swells considerably.
- Use real pearl tapiocaThis will not work with instant or quick-cooking tapioca, which is pre-gelatinised and dissolves into paste. Look for small pearl tapioca in the baking aisle or a large-pearl boba product from an Asian grocery, and expect the larger pearls to need more soaking than the half hour given.
- Transparent is the test, not the clockIn the double boiler the pearls go from chalky white to clear with only a faint opaque dot at the centre. Depending on pearl size this takes 20 to 45 minutes, and stirring occasionally keeps them from welding into a single mass.
- Add sugar yourselfThe recipe calls for no sugar at all, and as written the pudding is bland; it may have been expected at table, or a sweet sauce alongside. A third to a half cup of sugar stirred into the hot tapioca, plus a pinch of salt and a little lemon zest or cinnamon, suits it.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350F. Covered, the pared and cored apples take somewhere around 45 to 60 minutes to go completely tender, then the last ten minutes uncovered to colour the top.
- Choose the applesCooking varieties that hold shape are best here since the fruit is baked whole — Bramley collapses to sauce, while Granny Smith, Braeburn or Northern Spy stay recognisable. Fill the cored centres with sugar and a scrap of butter if you like.
- Dried fruitThe recipe specifies soaking but not cooking; dried fruit that has already been cooked is apt to disintegrate over the long bake. Soak in water or cider several hours, drain, and let the oven finish the job.
- YieldSix apples, six servings. Best warm rather than hot; tapioca stiffens as it cools and turns rubbery straight from the refrigerator.
Tapioca is starch extracted from cassava root, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders to Africa and Asia, and by the late nineteenth century the processed pearls were a cheap, shelf-stable staple in American pantries alongside sago and arrowroot. Puddings like this one belong to a whole family of Victorian and Edwardian starch-and-fruit bakes in which a thickener is poured over apples to bind their juices, the same principle later relied on in tapioca-thickened fruit pie fillings. Its appearance in the Butterick book, a publication of the dress-pattern company aimed at ordinary households, reflects exactly the qualities that recommended it: one inexpensive dry good, whatever fruit was in season or dried in the store cupboard, and a single covered dish in a moderate oven. The list of permitted substitutions at the end suggests the point of the entry is one method stretched across the entire fruit year.