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Tapioca Cream
Soak over night two table-spoons tapioca in one-half tea-cup milk (or enough to cover); bring one quart milk to boiling point; beat well together the yolks of three eggs, half tea-cup sugar, and one tea-spoon lemon or vanilla for flavoring, add the tapioca, and stir the whole into the boiling milk, let boil once, turn into the dish, and immediately spread on the whites. Serve when cold. - Mrs. R. M. Henderson.
A stirred yolk custard thickened with tapioca and finished with a soft meringue. Two things decide whether it works: the kind of tapioca you buy, and how hard you let the custard boil.
- Buy small pearl tapiocaThe overnight soak only makes sense for pearl tapioca, which was the standard grocery article in the 1880s. Instant or "minute" tapioca is pre-cooked and pulverized; it needs no soaking and will turn this into paste. Large pearls need longer soaking and will stay chewy in a custard this thin.
- The tea-cupA period tea-cup is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, though books of this era are inconsistent and some mean half a cup. On that reckoning half a tea-cup of sugar is roughly 6 tablespoons; start there and taste. For the soaking milk, simply use enough to cover the tapioca, as the recipe allows.
- "Let boil once" is the hingeThree yolks in a quart of milk will curdle at a full rolling boil. Bring the mixture just to the point where it swells and breaks once at the surface, then take it off. Holding it at 175-180F until it coats a spoon gives the same set without graininess.
- Temper the yolksPouring the cold yolk-sugar-tapioca mixture straight into boiling milk risks scrambling. Whisk a cup of the hot milk into the yolks first, then return everything to the pan.
- Flavoring"One tea-spoon lemon" means lemon extract, not juice; acid would help the custard split. Vanilla and lemon extract are interchangeable here. Add either after the custard leaves the heat, since heat drives off the aromatics.
- The meringue is uncookedBeaten whites spread on hot custard warm through but never reach a temperature that pasteurizes them. Either beat the whites with a spoonful or two of sugar and brown the assembled dish for 10-12 minutes at 350F, or use pasteurized whites if it is going straight to the table.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk gives roughly six modest servings. The recipe says only to turn it into 'the dish', which suggests a single serving dish taken to table whole, cold but not chilled hard; refrigerate it if it will stand more than an hour.
Tapioca reaches this book by a long route: it is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant, dried and rolled into the small white pearls that nineteenth-century grocers sold alongside sago and arrowroot. American cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s treat it as an invalid food and a nursery food as much as a dessert, prized because it thickened milk without flour or much labor, and because it was thought easy on the stomach. "Tapioca cream" of this stirred-custard-with-meringue type appears in many household books of the period in closely similar wording, which suggests how such recipes traveled: The Dixie Cook Book, like its Midwestern relation Buckeye Cookery, was assembled largely from contributions credited by name, and Mrs. R. M. Henderson's version is presumably one household's copy of a dish already in wide circulation.