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Tapioca Pudding
A pint milk, two and a half ounces tapioca, two ounces fine sugar, one and a half ounces butter, four egg yolks, the whites of four eggs whipped up to a froth, the zest of the rind of a sound lemon, one teaspoon vanilla essence and half saltspoon salt.
Place the milk, vanilla, lemon, salt and sugar in a saucepan, set the pan on the fire and as soon as it comes to a boil gently dredge in the tapioca, continually mixing with a wooden spoon meanwhile; then slowly cook for ten minutes, being careful to stir every minute. Remove from the fire, add the egg yolks, one by one, briskly mixing continually; then add the whipped-up whites, and gently mix with a skimmer for one minute.
Lightly butter and flour six individual pudding moulds, fill them with the preparation, place in a pastry tin, pour boiling water in the pan up to half the height of the moulds, and set the pan in the oven to cook for twenty minutes. Remove, unmould on a large dish; pour a Sabayon sauce, over the puddings and serve very hot.
A steamed-baked tapioca custard, lightened with whipped whites and turned out of moulds — closer to a soufflé pudding than to the nursery tapioca most people picture. The measurements are by weight, which makes it easier than most recipes of its age to reproduce exactly.
- Weights and volumesA pint of milk is 2 cups if the pint is American, 2½ cups if Imperial; 2½ oz tapioca is roughly ½ cup of small pearl, 2 oz sugar a scant ¼ cup, 1½ oz butter 3 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is a pinch — about ⅛ teaspoon.
- The butter has no instructionButter is listed in the ingredients but never called for in the method beyond greasing the moulds. Stirring it into the hot tapioca before the yolks go in is the obvious place for it.
- Which tapiocaThis wants small pearl or granulated ("minute") tapioca, the only kinds that will hydrate in ten minutes of simmering. Large pearl tapioca will still be chalky at the centre and needs a long soak first, which this recipe does not allow for.
- The hinge: temper the yolksThe pan comes off the heat before the yolks go in, one at a time with brisk mixing. Tapioca thickened with milk holds a great deal of heat, so add them singly and keep the spoon moving or the mixture will curdle before it ever reaches the oven.
- Folding, not mixingThe "skimmer" is a perforated spoon; use a spatula and fold the whites in with as few strokes as will incorporate them. The lift in these puddings comes entirely from the whites, and a minute of vigorous stirring will flatten them.
- Zest, not peel"Zest of the rind" means the coloured outer layer only, pared in strips. Fish the strips out before adding the yolks, or grate it finely and leave it in.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; for a water bath of this kind 350F is a reasonable modern setting. The water should stay at a bare tremble rather than a hard boil once in the oven — although the recipe does call for it to be poured in boiling — as violent bubbling will puff the puddings and then collapse them.
- Yield and unmouldingSix moulds of 4 to 6 oz each. Let them stand two or three minutes out of the water before turning out — straight from the bath they are too fragile to hold their shape.
- The sauceSabayon here is the French form of zabaglione: yolks, sugar and a fortified wine such as Marsala or sherry whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foamy. Make it while the puddings bake, since it will not hold.
Tapioca is the starch washed out of cassava root, a South American plant carried by Portuguese and Spanish traders into Africa and Asia, and though it was known in Europe earlier, as an eighteenth-century medicinal and invalid food, it became common in European and American kitchens in the nineteenth century as a cheap, bland thickener sold in pearls or flakes. In English-speaking households that reputation stuck: tapioca meant plain milk pudding, invalid food, school dinners. This version belongs to a different tradition he the professprofessional French repertoire, where the same starch is bound with yolks, lightened with whipped whites, baked au bain-marie in individual moulds and sauced with sabayon, the whole treatment identical to that given a rice or semolina pudding on a restaurant menu. The vocabulary gives the kitchen away: dredging in the grain, the wooden spoon, the skimmer, the pastry tin used as a water bath. The recipe reflects how these compendia worked, gathering a tropical starch, a French method and an Italian sauce onto one page and presenting the result as international cookery.