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Tapioca Meringue
Mrs. Spruance.
One teacup of tapioca soaked in one and a-half pints of warm water three hours; peel and core eight tart apples; fill apples with sugar, grating a little nutmeg or moistening with wine. One hour before needed pour the tapioca over the apples and bake, serving in the dish baked in. The addition of the whites of four well-beaten eggs spread over the top and browned slightly improves it.
A Victorian baked apple pudding in which soaked tapioca sets into a translucent jelly around whole apples. Two things decide whether it works: the type of tapioca and the length of the soak.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe recipe assumes small pearl tapioca, which needs long hydration. Instant or minute tapioca will turn to paste in a three-hour soak; large pearls will stay chalky in the middle.
- A teacupPeriod teacups are usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fluid ounces, so roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup of dry tapioca. One and a half pints is 3 cups of warm water, a generous proportion of liquid — the apples give off little of their own.
- Do not shorten the soakThe three hours of soaking matter. Pearls that go in insufficiently hydrated tend to draw moisture from the surrounding liquid as they bake, and are more likely to set cloudy and stiff than clear.
- OvenNo temperature is given; a moderate oven of about 350F suits the hour of baking the recipe allows. Much hotter risks colouring the surface before the pearls have gone clear.
- The applesTart cooking apples that hold their shape, such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy; avoid varieties like Bramley that collapse to a purée. Peel and core them whole and stand them upright in the baking dish so the sugar filling stays put.
- Wine or nutmegThe wine is a moistener for the sugar in the cavity; sherry, madeira or a sweet white are all in keeping. A tablespoon per apple is plenty.
- The meringueThe recipe calls only for the whites of four eggs, well beaten, spread over the top and browned slightly; no sugar is specified, though a few tablespoons may be beaten in if a sweetened meringue is wanted. Ten to fifteen minutes in the same moderate oven should be enough — "browned slightly" means pale gold, not toasted.
- Yield and servingEight apples, so eight servings. It is meant to go to the table in its baking dish and be eaten warm; the tapioca stiffens considerably as it cools.
Tapioca, the starch washed out of cassava root, was cheap, bland and endlessly useful for stretching fruit into a pudding — the reason it turns up so often in nineteenth-century dessert chapters alongside sago and arrowroot. Baked apples set in a starch jelly and capped with meringue is the kind of family sweet these chapters are full of, requiring no pastry, no cream and very little sugar beyond what goes in the cores. The attribution to Mrs. Spruance is characteristic of The Home Cook Book, generally described as one of the first American charity compilations, in which Chicago households each contributed signed recipes and the proceeds went to a local benevolent institution. The signature was both a credit and a guarantee: the dish had been made, in a real kitchen, by someone the subscribers knew.