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Apple Tapioca Pudding
To half tea-cup of tapioca, add one and one-half pints cold water, let it stand on the fire till cooked clear, stirring to prevent burning, remove, sweeten and flavor with wine and nutmeg; pour the tapioca into a deep dish in which have been placed six or eight pared and cored apples, bake until apples are done, and serve cold with cream.-Mrs. S. C. Lee.
A straightforward baked tapioca with whole apples set in it, of a type that appears in dozens of American books of the 1880s. Two things are left unsaid: what kind of tapioca, and how hot the oven.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe recipe assumes small pearl tapioca, which needs the long cooking in water described here to go from opaque to clear. Instant or minute tapioca will turn to paste in the first few minutes and will not behave the same way; large pearls will need soaking for an hour or more first.
- A half tea-cupA nineteenth-century tea-cup is usually reckoned at somewhere between four and six fluid ounces, so half of one is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup of dry tapioca. With a pint and a half of water (3 cups) that is a fairly loose ratio, which is what you want here, since the mixture has to pour around the apples and will thicken further in the oven.
- Cooked clearThis is the hinge. Cook the tapioca over low heat, stirring, until the pearls lose their white centres entirely and the mass is translucent, 15 to 20 minutes. Undercooked tapioca will stay chalky in the baked pudding and no amount of oven time will fix it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for 45 minutes to an hour, until a skewer slides through the apples without resistance. Cover loosely with foil if the top sets and browns before the fruit is soft.
- The applesWhole pared and cored apples, standing in the dish, so choose a firm variety that holds shape rather than one that collapses into sauce. Six to eight medium apples want a deep dish of two to three quarts. The cored cavities are the natural place for a little sugar and nutmeg.
- Wine and nutmegThe recipe says only 'wine'; sherry or Madeira would suit, and two tablespoons is plenty for this quantity. Add it off the heat with the sugar, as the recipe directs, so the aroma is not boiled away. Grate the nutmeg fresh.
- SweeteningNo amount is specified. About 1/2 cup of sugar suits the tapioca, with a little more in the apple cavities if the fruit is tart.
- ServingServes six to eight, one apple each. It is meant to be served cold, and it does set firm as it cools; plain pouring cream rather than whipped suits it.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, was sold in American kitchens as an imported grocery through the nineteenth century and was widely promoted as an invalid and nursery food: bland, cheap, easily digested, and it stretched a small amount of fruit into a full dish. Puddings of this kind sit alongside sago and arrowroot recipes, worked on the same principle of a clear starch thickening combined with fruit. The whole pared apple set in the dish is a long-standing English habit, and the splash of wine with grated nutmeg belongs to the same tradition, where a bottle of sherry served as a flavouring as much as a drink. This recipe is credited to a contributor by name, Mrs. S. C. Lee, as many recipes in these community-compiled volumes were.