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Tapioca Custard Pudding
Take one breakfast cupful of tapioca, pour over it just enough water to cover, and allow it to steep all night. Beat the yolks of five eggs lightly. Pour one quart of milk into a saucepan over the fire, and when warm stir in the beaten yolks, and one-half pound of powdered white sugar. Sprinkle a very little salt over the soaked tapioca, remove the milk and eggs from the fire before they boil, and beat them into it. Whisk the whites of five eggs to a firm froth, stir them lightly and quickly into the pudding, pour it into a buttered pudding-basin, stand it in a pan of boiling water, and bake in a moderate oven with a dish turned down over it to cover it until the custard thickens; then remove it from the oven, take the cover off, lift it out of the hot water, and stand it in the hot part of the oven to brown. It may be served either hot or cold.
A baked custard stiffened with tapioca, cooked in a water bath and browned at the end. The hinge is the custard: the milk and yolks must come off the heat before they boil, and the pudding must come out of the oven while it still trembles.
- Which tapiocaThis means whole pearl tapioca, which is why it soaks overnight. Instant or minute tapioca is pre-cooked and will turn to paste; small pearl tapioca soaked overnight is the closest match.
- A breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is generally reckoned at around 10 to 12 fluid ounces, larger than the teacup used elsewhere in period books, though period cup measures were not standardised. A full cup of dry pearl tapioca swells enormously in a quart of milk and gives a very stiff, sliceable pudding; half that gives something closer to a modern custard.
- Powdered white sugarIn 1896 this means finely granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Half a pound is about 1⅛ cups, which is markedly sweet for a quart of milk by current taste.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 325 to 350F. The water bath keeps the custard well below that, so it sets gently rather than curdling.
- Pudding-basin and coverA deep ovenproof bowl of 2 1/2 to 3 quarts, given the volume once the whites are in. The "dish turned down over it" is simply an inverted plate acting as a lid, keeping the surface pale and moist until the browning stage.
- When it is doneThe custard is set when the edges are firm and the centre still wobbles as a mass, around 170 to 175F on a thermometer. Expect 50 to 70 minutes in the water bath. Carried past that, the eggs tighten and weep.
- The browning"The hot part of the oven" most likely means the top, or whichever part of the range oven ran hottest. A few minutes near the upper element, or under a broiler with close watching, colours the surface; the pudding continues to set from residual heat.
- The whitesFold them in rather than stir, and work quickly. They lighten the body of the pudding, but overworking collapses them and you lose the reason for separating the eggs at all.
- YieldA quart of milk and five eggs serves eight generously. Cold, it firms considerably and can be turned out.
Tapioca reached nineteenth-century kitchens as a shelf-stable starch extracted from cassava root, shipped in pearls from Brazil and the East Indies, and it slotted neatly into the enormous family of English milk puddings alongside rice, sago and semolina. What distinguishes this version is that it is really a baked custard with tapioca in it rather than a boiled tapioca thickened with egg: the water bath, the separated eggs and the final browning are the technique of a hotel pastry kitchen applied to a nursery dish. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, gathers a great many such homely preparations beside the restaurant's grander work. The overnight soak is worth noting as a period habit: unprocessed pearl tapioca needed hours to hydrate, though quick-cooking granular tapioca was already reaching the American market in the 1890s.