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Tapioca Pudding (II)
Mrs. Rice.
Cover three tablespoons tapioca with water; stand over night; add one quart milk, a small piece of butter, a little salt, and boil; beat the yolks of three eggs with a cup of sugar, and boil the whole to a very thick custard; flavour with vanilla; when cold cover with whites of eggs beaten.
A boiled custard thickened with tapioca, in the contributed style of the period: quantities given, method assumed. The two things worth watching are the type of tapioca and the heat under the custard.
- Which tapiocaThis means small pearl tapioca, which is why it soaks overnight. Instant or minute tapioca needs no soaking and will turn the pudding to paste if substituted measure for measure; large pearls of the boba type will not soften properly in this amount of liquid.
- The soakThree tablespoons barely covered in cold water, left overnight, swells the pearls so they cook through in the milk rather than staying gritty at the centre. A refrigerator soak is safer than a countertop one in a warm kitchen.
- Do not boil the custardThe instruction to "boil the whole to a very thick custard" reflects a stove with unreliable heat and a cook standing over it. Egg yolks set at about 180F and curdle above that; cook it in a double boiler or over low heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon.
- ProportionsOne quart of milk to three yolks and one cup of sugar is a thin, sweet custard by modern taste. The tapioca does most of the thickening. Half the sugar is closer to current preference and, with the tapioca carrying the body, should make little practical difference to the set.
- The raw meringueAs written, the beaten whites go onto the cold pudding uncooked. Raw white is the one part of this dish never brought to temperature; brown the meringue in a 350F oven for eight to ten minutes, or use pasteurised whites, if serving anyone vulnerable.
- Meringue techniqueUnsweetened whites are prone to weeping on a cold custard. Beat in about two tablespoons of sugar per white for stability, and spread the meringue so it touches the rim of the dish all round.
- "A small piece of butter"Read this as one to two tablespoons. It is there for richness and to keep the milk from catching, not for structure.
- YieldA quart of milk gives six to eight servings. Chill at least three hours; the tapioca continues to thicken as it cools.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese and Spanish traders into Africa and Asia; by the nineteenth century the pearl form reached North American grocers via Brazil and the East Indies, and it became a staple of the invalid tray and the nursery because it was cheap, bland and easy to digest. Recipes like this one, credited to a contributor by name, are characteristic of The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 from recipes solicited from local households and generally traced as one of the earliest Canadian community cookbooks sold to raise money for a hospital. The style of the entry tells you as much as the ingredients do: no oven, no timings, no yield, because the compiler assumed a reader who had made custard before and needed only the proportions.