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Tapioca Custard
Steep seven or eight ounces of tapioca in one quart of cold milk and stand it in a warm place. Pour into a saucepan two quarts of milk with two ounces of sugar; when boiling add the steeped tapioca and boil for fifteen minutes. Stir in two ounces of butter, then the yolks of a dozen well-beaten eggs, and remove the pan at once from the fire. Allow the custard to cool, flavor it with vanilla or lemon and pour it into the freezer; when nearly frozen add one breakfast cupful of cream whipped to a stiff froth and beat all together well before using.
This is a frozen dessert rather than a baked custard: a tapioca-thickened cr he pan is a raw pot of ice cream base, churned in an old-style ice-and-salt freezer. It scales to well over three quarts, so most cooks will want to halve or quarter it.
- Read the ounces as weightSeven or eight ounces of tapioca is weight, not volume, and comes to roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of small pearl tapioca. Likewise the 2 oz sugar (a scant 1/3 cup) and 2 oz butter (4 tablespoons).
- Which tapiocaThe book assumes pearl tapioca, which is why it is steeped in cold milk first. Modern instant or "minute" tapioca is pre-gelatinized and will thicken almost at once, turning the mixture to paste well before fifteen minutes are up; use pearl tapioca if you follow the method as written.
- "A breakfast cupful"A breakfast cup is a large cup, generally taken as 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Treat it as one generous cup of heavy cream, whipped to soft-stiff peaks.
- The yolks are the hingeTwelve yolks go into a near-boiling mixture off the heat. Stir them in fast and keep stirring; a slow hand gives scrambled egg. Straining the finished base through a fine sieve is worth the trouble.
- Watch the bottom of the panFifteen minutes of boiling with tapioca in it means constant stirring and a heavy-bottomed pan. Scorched milk solids will flavor the whole batch and cannot be strained out.
- "The freezer"This means a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, not a modern box freezer. In an electric ice cream machine, chill the base thoroughly overnight, churn until thick, then fold and beat in the whipped cream at the end as directed.
- SweetnessTwo ounces of sugar for three quarts of milk is barely sweet by current standards, and freezing mutes sweetness further. Taste the cooled base; 6 to 8 oz of sugar gives something closer to a modern frozen custard.
- TextureTapioca pearls firm up and turn chewy when frozen, which is the point of the dish rather than a fault. Serve it soon after churning; long storage makes the pearls tough and the custard icy.
- YieldAs written, about three and a half quarts of base, more once churned; enough for 20 or more servings.
Oscar Tschirky, the ma tre d'h el whose name sold this 1896 book, was cataloguing the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen, which is why the quantities run to gallons rather than pints. Frozen puddings and "iced custards" thickened with rice, sago or tapioca were standard on late-Victorian hotel menus, sitting between plain ice cream and the more elaborate bombes and biscuits glac s. The tapioca itself was a colonial-trade good: starch washed from the root of cassava, shipped in graded pearls from Brazil and Southeast Asia, and by the 1890s cheap and familiar enough in American cities to be a nursery staple as well as a hotel one. The ice-and-salt freezer that finishes the dish was itself a mark of the era's commercial ice trade, which put frozen desserts within reach of any kitchen able to buy a block.