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Tapioca Jelly
Put one-half teacupful of tapioca into a basin with one breakfast cupful of cold water and let it steep for two hours, standing the basin in a warm place. Pour two more breakfast cupfuls of water into a saucepan, add six or eight ounces of sugar, and then the rind of half a lemon cut up into shreds, and squeeze in the juice of half a lemon. Boil for a few minutes, pour in the tapioca and water and cook gently for about twenty minutes at the side of the fire, by which time the tapioca should be quite transparent. Add a little syrup of cranberries or burnt sugar to color, pour the jelly into a mould, let it set, turn it out onto a dish and serve with sweet cream. The coloring may be dispensed with if desired.
A clear, set tapioca pudding of the sort that turns out of a mould. Nothing here is difficult, but the measures are Victorian and the tapioca is not the kind sold in most boxes today.
- The tapioca to buyThis wants small pearl tapioca, which is why it steeps for two hours and cooks for twenty. Instant or minute tapioca is pre-cooked and will dissolve into paste; large boba pearls will not set into a jelly.
- Cups, teacup and breakfastA teacupful is roughly 6 fl oz, so the half teacupful of tapioca is about 3 fl oz, call it 1/3 cup dry. A breakfast cupful is a full 8-10 fl oz; treat each as 1 cup, giving 1 cup of soaking water and 2 cups in the pan.
- SugarSix to eight ounces is roughly 1 to 1 1/8 cups by weight, which is very sweet by current taste for three cups of liquid. Sugar is not what sets the jelly, so half the amount will still set and still taste of lemon.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the plate: a bare simmer with the occasional bubble. On a modern burner use the lowest setting and stir often, since tapioca sinks and scorches.
- Judging donenessThe pearls should be wholly translucent with no white speck at the centre. A chalky core means the jelly will be gritty no matter how long it later chills.
- Burnt sugar and cranberry syrup"Burnt sugar" is caramel cooked dark and let down with a spoonful of water, used purely as colouring. Cranberry syrup can be replaced with any tart red fruit syrup, or left out as the recipe allows.
- Setting and unmouldingThere is no gelatin; the set comes from tapioca starch alone, so it is soft and needs several hours cold, not merely cool. Rinse the mould in cold water before filling and dip it briefly in warm water to turn out.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving four to six with cream poured round rather than over.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders through Africa and Asia and reaching British and American kitchens as small dried pearls, in Britain by at least the eighteenth century. Because it was bland, cheap and easy on the stomach, it became a staple of nursery and sickroom cookery, and "jelly" in this period meant any clear dish that set firm enough to turn out of a mould, not necessarily one made with gelatin. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, published his book in 1896, and the instruction to cook "at the side of the fire" places this one squarely in the era of the coal range, where heat was managed by moving the pot rather than turning a dial.