Home › Luncheon › Caramel Tapioca
Caramel Tapioca
1/2 cup old-fashioned pearl tapioca 1 cup Karo, Orange Label 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1 quart boiling water Combine the Karo, salt, vanilla Add the tapioca, which should be hours in a moderate oven, removing Serve with cream or Karo.
Soak the tapioca over night. and water in a baking dish. drained, cover and bake two the cover the second hour.
A corn-syrup pudding from a promotional booklet, built on large pearl tapioca rather than the quick-cooking granules that replaced it. The order of operations in the printed text is jumbled; the working sequence is to soak the tapioca overnight, drain it, stir the syrup, salt, vanilla and boiling water together in a baking dish, add the tapioca, then bake covered for one hour and uncovered for a second.
- Soaking is not optionalOld-fashioned pearl tapioca is a hard, dry bead that needs a full overnight soak in cold water before it will hydrate evenly. Skip it and you get chalky centres no amount of baking will fix.
- Pearl, not instantModern "quick" or "minute" tapioca is pre-cooked and ground; it will dissolve into paste over two hours in the oven. Look for large pearl tapioca (the boba-style bead) if you want the intended texture.
- Karo Orange LabelKaro was sold in several colour-coded labels of differing depth and flavour; precisely where the Orange Label sat in that range is not established here. Dark corn syrup is a reasonable modern stand-in, and the syrup is the only sweetener and the only source of colour in the dish, which is presumably where the "caramel" of the title comes from.
- A cup of syrupOne cup of corn syrup weighs roughly 11-12 oz, considerably more than a cup of sugar. This is a sweet pudding by design; there is no additional sugar.
- Moderate ovenRead that as roughly 350-375F; 350F is the safer choice for a two-hour bake. If the top is colouring too fast once the cover comes off in the second hour, drop to 325F rather than shortening the bake.
- The uncovered hourRemoving the cover for the second hour is what thickens the syrup and darkens the surface. Covered the whole way through, it stays thin and pale.
- VesselUse a 2-quart baking dish with a lid, or cover tightly with foil. A quart of water plus the swollen tapioca needs the headroom.
- YieldAbout six servings. Serve warm or at room temperature with cream, as directed; it sets further as it cools.
This comes from the genre of manufacturer cookbooks that flourished in the early twentieth century, when Corn Products Refining Company promoted Karo syrup as a general-purpose sweetener for home baking and desserts rather than merely a table syrup. Karo was sold in colour-coded labels of differing depth and flavour, and booklets like this one existed to persuade cooks that syrup could replace sugar in puddings, cakes and candies. Tapioca, milled from cassava root and imported in pearl form, was a luncheon and nursery staple in the same period, valued because it was cheap, kept indefinitely in the pantry and stretched a small amount of sweetening into a substantial dish. The long slow bake is characteristic of pre-war pudding cookery.