Home › Puddings and Dessert Sauces › Tapioca Cream Pudding
Tapioca Cream Pudding
2 cups scalded milk 1 1/2 egg cup sugar 1 tablespoons minute tapioca, or cup pearl tapioca teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Pick over tapioca and soak 1 hour in cold water to cover. Drain, add to milk and cook in a double boiler until tapioca is transparent. Mix the yolks with the sugar and salt. Combine by pouring hot mixture slowly into egg mixture. Return to double boiler and cook until it thickens while stirring constantly. Fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff, remove from range, chill and serve. If minute tapioca is used, it need not be soaked. 1
A plain boiled custard thickened with tapioca and lightened with beaten whites. The text has lost most of its fractions in transcription, so read the quantities with care before you start.
- The missing fractionsSeveral amounts are incomplete: "cup sugar", "cup pearl tapioca" and "teaspoon salt" all originally carried fractions that dropped out. Something on the order of 1/3 cup sugar, 1/4 cup pearl tapioca (or 3 tablespoons minute) and 1/4 teaspoon salt to 2 cups milk would suit a pudding of this kind, but treat that as a guess rather than a reading of this particular text.
- Two kinds of tapiocaPearl tapioca is cassava starch formed into small dried beads, and it genuinely needs the hour-long soak and a long cook to go clear. "Minute" tapioca is the pre-cooked granulated type sold today as quick-cooking tapioca; it swells in five to ten minutes and, as the recipe says, needs no soaking.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to about 180F, until a rim of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan, not to a rolling boil. It was originally done to check souring in unpasteurized milk; it still speeds the tapioca's swelling.
- Why the double boilerEgg-thickened milk curdles a little above 180F, and tapioca settles and scorches on direct heat. The double boiler caps the temperature. If you use a heavy saucepan on low heat instead, stir without pause and pull it the moment it coats a spoon.
- Tempering"Combine by pouring hot mixture slowly into egg mixture" is the whole trick. Add the hot tapioca and milk to the yolks in a thin stream while whisking, then return the lot to the double boiler; dumping the yolks into hot milk gives you sweet scrambled egg.
- The beaten whitesThe whites are folded into the hot custard off the heat and are not cooked further, so they are effectively barely-cooked egg. Pasteurized shell eggs or carton whites are the sensible choice if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- ChillingCool it uncovered for a few minutes, then press plastic wrap or buttered paper onto the surface to stop a skin forming. It needs at least two hours cold; the tapioca continues to set as it chills, so a pudding that looks loose off the range will be right later.
- YieldTwo cups of milk plus eggs makes four modest servings, or three generous ones. The recipe itself says only to chill and serve, and specifies no dish or accompaniment.
Tapioca is starch washed from the root of cassava, a South American plant carried by Portuguese and Spanish traders into Africa and Asia, and it reached nineteenth-century American kitchens as an imported dried pearl that had to be picked over for grit and soaked before use. The pre-cooked granulated form, sold from the 1890s under the brand name Minute Tapioca, cut that work down and is why this recipe carries two sets of instructions: the book was written in the years when both kinds sat on the shelf. The Metropolitan Cook Book itself was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed free to policyholders as part of a broad welfare-and-health campaign, which fits the character of the recipe -- cheap, milk-based, egg-stretched and nourishing.