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A Simple Dessert
A. S. Ewing.
Put a teacup of tapioca into sufficient cold water; boil until the lumps become almost transparent; squeeze the juice of two lemons partially into the mixture, then slice them into it, sweeten or not, then eat when cold with cream and sugar.
A nineteenth-century tapioca sweet of the plainest sort, written for a cook who already knew how tapioca behaves. The gaps worth filling are the type of tapioca, the water ratio and what to do about the lemon peel.
- Which tapiocaThis means the old-style pearl or flake tapioca, not the instant granules sold today. Small pearls benefit from a soak in cold water for an hour or so before cooking; instant tapioca thickens in minutes and will turn to paste if treated this way.
- A teacupA Victorian teacup is roughly 3/4 cup, not a full measuring cup. That amount of dry pearl tapioca swells enormously, enough for four to six servings.
- "Sufficient cold water"Reckon on about four cups of water to 3/4 cup of pearls. Start in cold water and bring it up gently, stirring now and then, or the pearls sink and weld to the pan bottom.
- When it is done"Almost transparent" is the right test and the hinge of the recipe: a white opaque dot at the centre of each pearl means it is nearly there, and the residual heat will finish it. Fully clear pearls in a hot pan are already on their way to glue.
- The sliced lemonsWhole slices, pith and peel, steeped in the hot tapioca will turn it bitter if left long. Add them off the heat, taste after ten minutes, and lift them out before chilling if the bitterness rises. Zest plus juice gives the same perfume with none of the risk.
- Sweetening"Sweeten or not" is genuinely optional here, but with two lemons' juice in it the dish is sharp. About a third of a cup of sugar stirred in while hot dissolves cleanly; sugar added cold sits gritty.
- ServingIt sets firm as it cools, so chill it in the serving dish or in individual glasses. Cream and sugar at the table, as directed, are what make it a dessert rather than a sickroom dish.
Tapioca is the starch of the cassava root, shipped to nineteenth-century American kitchens from Brazil and the West Indies in pearls or flake and prized as much for digestibility as for flavour; it appears constantly in Victorian cookbooks under puddings, invalid cookery and nursery food. The named attribution and the shorthand of one cook passing a note to another are characteristic of the charity-compiled community cookbooks of the period, which gathered recipes from local contributors and printed them under their names rather than in a single house style. The lemon treatment here, juice and sliced fruit stirred through a plain boiled starch, is a common economical way of the period to flavour a dessert without eggs, spices or imported extracts.