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Apple Tapioca
Follow recipe for Caramel Tapioca on preceding page, first putting a layer of thinly sliced tart apple in the dish . Serve cold.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on a recipe you cannot see, so the useful work here is filling in what a 1900s luncheon cook would have taken for granted about baked tapioca puddings.
- The missing base recipeCaramel Tapioca in books of this period is generally pearl or minute tapioca cooked with milk or water, sweetened with burnt (caramelised) sugar, and baked or set in a mould. Since the quantities are on the preceding page, use any modern baked tapioca pudding as your framework and treat this page as the apple instruction only.
- Tapioca is not interchangeableLarge pearl tapioca needs a soak of an hour or more in cold water before it will cook through; minute or instant tapioca needs none and will turn to glue if given one. Check which you have before you start, because the difference decides whether the dish sets or slumps.
- Oven heatThe page says nothing about baking or temperature, and the base recipe is unseen. If it does bake, tapioca puddings are generally given a slow to moderate oven for around an hour; too fierce a heat risks curdling the milk and leaving the pearls chalky in the centre.
- Tart apple, and why it is specifiedA firm acid apple - Granny Smith, Northern Spy - holds its slices and cuts the sweetness of the caramel. A sweet dessert apple is more likely to collapse into sauce and make the pudding cloying.
- Slice thinly, and mean itThe apples sit under the tapioca and get little direct heat, so slice them thin, about an eighth of an inch, or they may still be firm at the bottom. Overlap them in a single layer rather than heaping them.
- Serve cold means fully coldTapioca thickens considerably as it cools. Give it several hours in the refrigerator; served warm it will be noticeably looser.
- YieldThis depends entirely on the base recipe on the page you cannot see; a quart-sized tapioca pudding would serve roughly four to six. Cream poured over was a common accompaniment to such puddings.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, reached North American and British kitchens through the colonial tropical trade and became a staple of the late nineteenth-century household because it was cheap, kept indefinitely on the shelf, and thickened milk into a pudding. Books of this era print tapioca puddings in long variation chains - caramel, apple, orange, prune - each recipe assuming you have just read the one above it, which is why this entry is a single sentence. Apple with tapioca is an easy pairing: the fruit was in the cellar most of the year, and a tart apple gave a bland, starchy pudding something to push against.