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Tapioca Cream (Two tablespoons of tapioca)
Two tablespoons of tapioca dissolved very soft, three yolks of eggs beaten and sweetened to the taste; boil one quart of milk, when cool stir in the tapioca and flavour; beat the whites very light and mix all together; let boil ten minutes, pour into moulds.
A thin, pourable custard set with tapioca rather than gelatin, written for a cook who already knew what a boiled custard should look like. The instructions as printed are out of order, and the boiling time is the part to ignore.
- The hinge: do not boil the custardEgg yolks curdle around 180F, so a ten-minute boil after the eggs go in will scramble them. Cook the thickened mixture over low heat or a water bath until it coats a spoon, then take it off; the tapioca needs the long heat, the eggs do not.
- Read the order as: cook tapioca, then temper eggsThe verbatim text says to boil the milk, cool it, then add tapioca. In practice soak the tapioca first, simmer it in the milk until the grains are clear, then whisk a little hot milk into the sweetened yolks before returning them to the pan.
- "Dissolved very soft"This means pearl tapioca soaked in cold water or milk for an hour or more until swollen and translucent, not dissolved in any literal sense. Modern quick-cooking or minute tapioca needs no soak and thickens faster, so reduce the simmering time accordingly.
- Two tablespoons to a quart is looseThat ratio gives a soft, spoonable cream rather than something that will stand up out of a mould. If you want it to unmould cleanly, expect to use closer to a third of a cup of tapioca; otherwise serve it in glasses.
- "Sweetened to the taste"For a quart of milk, a third to a half cup of sugar is the usual range. Add a pinch of salt, which the recipe omits and which the custard needs.
- "Flavour"Vanilla extract, a scrape of nutmeg, or lemon zest are all period-appropriate. Add extract off the heat so it does not cook away.
- The whitesBeat them to soft peaks and fold them in once the custard is off the heat and still warm. The whites will be barely cooked by residual heat, so use pasteurized whites if that matters to you, or fold in a meringue cooked with hot sugar syrup.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk makes about six generous servings. Chill at least three hours; the tapioca continues to firm as it cools, so judge the set cold, not hot.
Tapioca is starch washed out of the cassava root, a South American plant whose refined starch was sold in European and North American shops in pearl, flake and granulated form through the nineteenth century. Raw cassava contains cyanogenic compounds and must be processed to be edible, which is why it arrived in the pantry already refined rather than as a vegetable. Tapioca cream, along with its cousins sago and arrowroot pudding, was valued in Victorian households as an invalid dish and a nursery dessert: cheap, bland, made from milk and eggs, and gentle enough to be recommended for the sick. Its appearance in The Home Cook Book, a Chicago charity compilation built from contributed household receipts, is typical of the genre, where such a recipe was written down in one breathless line because every reader was assumed to have made a boiled custard before.