Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Cream Tapioca Pudding
Cream Tapioca Pudding
Mrs. A. T. Hall.
Soak three tablespoons of tapioca in water over night; put the tapioca into a quart of boiling milk, and boil half an hour; beat the yolks of four eggs with a cup of sugar; add three tablespoons of prepared cocoanut ; stir in and boil ten minutes longer; pour into a pudding dish; beat the whites of the four eggs to a stiff froth, stir in three tablespoons of sugar; put this over the top and sprinkle cocoanut over the top and brown for five minutes.
A straightforward baked-custard tapioca with a coconut meringue lid. The only real difficulty is the half hour of boiling milk, which will scorch on a modern thin-bottomed pan over direct heat.
- Use a double boiler or very low heatA quart of milk held at a boil for thirty minutes needs watching on a modern thin-bottomed pan over direct heat. Set the pan in simmering water, or keep the milk at a bare simmer and stir often, or the sugar and milk solids will catch and taint the whole pudding.
- Which tapiocaThe overnight soak means small pearl tapioca, not instant or "minute" tapioca and not the large boba pearls. Three tablespoons of pearls swell considerably; if you substitute quick-cooking tapioca, skip the soak and shorten the milk cooking to about 15 minutes.
- Prepared cocoanutThis is shredded, dried coconut of the kind sold ready-prepared in packets in the later nineteenth century, close to today's flaked coconut. If yours is unsweetened desiccated coconut the pudding will taste less rich; the cup of sugar in the custard is already generous.
- Temper the yolksThe instruction to "stir in" the beaten yolks and sugar goes badly if you pour them straight into boiling milk. Whisk a ladle or two of the hot tapioca milk into the yolk mixture first, then return it all to the pan and cook the ten minutes at a simmer, stirring, so it thickens rather than curdles.
- Browning temperatureThe recipe says only 'brown for five minutes' and names no oven. In a modern kitchen that means a hot oven or a few inches under the broiler, watched closely. Spread the meringue so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which keeps it from shrinking away as it sets.
- Dish and yieldUse a 2-quart baking dish; the custard plus the meringue will nearly fill it. This serves six to eight, and is best barely warm or at room temperature rather than hot, when the tapioca is still loose.
- On the meringueFive minutes at high heat browns the surface but leaves the inside of the meringue soft and only partly cooked. Spooning it onto the pudding while the custard is still steaming hot helps set it from below; if that matters to you, cook the meringue longer at a lower temperature instead.
Tapioca — the starch washed out of cassava root — reached American kitchens through the Brazilian and West Indian trade and was cheap, bland and easy to digest, which is why 19th-century books file it with arrowroot and sago among the puddings recommended for invalids and children. The "cream" in the title probably refers to the enriched custard rather than any added cream, and the coconut is the tell of the period: shredded, dried coconut is generally said to have become a widely sold packaged grocery in the United States in the later decades of the century, and cookbooks of the following decades scatter it through cakes, pies and puddings with a freedom earlier writers could not have managed, since they would have had to crack and grate the nut themselves. The Home Cook Book was one of the great community compilations, published in Chicago in 1874 and assembled from recipes contributed by named local women, which is why this one arrives credited to Mrs. A. T. Hall rather than to an author — the whole book is a record of what was actually being cooked in particular households.