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Fig or Date Tapioca
Follow recipe for Caramel Tapioca on preceding page, adding one and one-half cups shredded dates or moist figs before starting to bake. Serve cold. on THE flavor and digestibility of fried foods depends the fat that is used. Mazola has the delicate flavor of fat that is used. Mazola has the delicate flavor of the hearts of corn from which it is pressed-a flavor so dainty that it immediately blends with the frying foods.
As it is a vegetable oil, it can be heated to the right temright temperature for deep-fat frying without scorching or burning .
Deep-Mazola-Frying is really BAKING in oil.
Although Mazola is PURE fat, the foods fried in it-by the recipes in this book-are singularly free from grease. They are healthful, easily prepared additions to the everyday menu.
A one-line variation on the baked caramel tapioca from the previous page, with the publisher's advertising copy for Mazola oil running on directly after it. The frying paragraph has nothing to do with the pudding.
- The base recipe is missingEverything structural — the tapioca, milk, sugar and baking time — lives in the Caramel Tapioca recipe on the preceding page, which is not reproduced here. Any baked caramel tapioca custard will serve as a substitute; the quantities are not recoverable from this page.
- Tapioca typeA recipe of this vintage most likely means pearl tapioca, which needs soaking an hour or more in the milk before baking, though quick-cooking (minute) tapioca was also on sale by this period. The two are not interchangeable measure for measure; quick-cooking swells faster and in less liquid, and will set stiff if substituted directly.
- Oven temperatureIf the base recipe is an egg-and-milk custard, treat it as one: a moderate oven, around 325-350F in modern terms, with the dish in a pan of hot water if your oven runs hot, until the center is just set and still trembling. The book itself gives no temperature.
- "Moist figs"Dried figs sold as "moist" or "pulled" were soft enough to shred with a knife. If yours are leathery, cover them with hot water for ten minutes, drain, and pat dry before shredding, or they will draw liquid out of the custard as it bakes.
- Quantity of fruitOne and a half cups of shredded dates or figs is about 8 to 9 oz by weight — a substantial amount of sugar arriving with the fruit. Cut the sugar in the base caramel recipe if you find the result cloying.
- Add before baking, not afterThe instruction to stir the fruit in before starting to bake matters: the dates soften and release their flavor into the custard. Folded in afterward they stay dense and separate.
- Serve coldThe recipe specifies it. Baked tapioca is slack when warm and firms as it chills; several hours in the refrigerator lets it set to a spoonable pudding. Keep it covered and refrigerated.
This page shows a promotional cookbook doing its job: the recipe is real, but the paragraph welded to the end of it is sales copy for Mazola, the corn oil that Corn Products Refining Company introduced in the early twentieth century and promoted heavily through free recipe booklets. The claim that deep frying in a vegetable oil is "really BAKING in oil" and yields food "free from grease" was a standard argument of the period, aimed at a public that associated frying with lard, indigestion and heaviness. The pudding itself belongs to an older tradition: tapioca, made from cassava starch and imported in pearl form, was a staple of invalid and nursery cookery through the nineteenth century, and dressing it up with caramel and dried fruit was the usual way of making it acceptable at the luncheon table. Dates and figs arrived in American kitchens before the First World War pressed into blocks or boxes from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern growers.