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Tapioca Souffle
This is a really delicious sweet. Put one-half cupful of pearl tapioca over the fire with one pint of milk; cook until the tapioca is clear; add one cupful of sugar and the yolks of four eggs well beaten; stir one minute; then remove from the fire and when almost cold, flavor with vanilla; add the well whisked whites of eggs; pour half the mixture into a souffle pan, scatter one ounce of candied cherries over it, when add the other half and bake for twenty minutes. Serve at once.
A baked tapioca custard lightened with meringue — closer to a pudding souffle than a savoury one, and forgiving as long as the whites go in cold and stay aerated. The original omits an oven temperature, which is the main gap to fill.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. Twenty minutes suits a shallow dish; a deeper 1½-quart souffle dish will want 30 to 40 minutes, until the centre is set but still trembling.
- Pearl tapiocaOld-style pearl tapioca is the large opaque bead, and it wants an hour or more of soaking in the milk before it will cook clear in a reasonable time. Modern small pearl works with a 30-minute soak; instant or minute tapioca is a different product and will turn to paste here.
- MeasuresOne pint of milk is 2 cups. Half a cupful of pearl tapioca is roughly 3 oz dry. One ounce of candied cherries is about 6 to 8 cherries, halved.
- SugarA full cup with only a pint of milk is very sweet by current taste. Two-thirds of a cup gives a dessert that still sets and no longer masks the vanilla.
- Adding the yolksThe sugar and beaten yolks go in over heat for only that one minute, and the pan should be off a direct flame or on the lowest setting. Any longer and the yolks scramble into threads through the tapioca.
- "When almost cold"This is the hinge. Fold the whisked whites into a base that is barely warm at most — hot tapioca deflates meringue on contact and you get a dense pudding instead of a souffle. Fold in thirds, cutting rather than stirring.
- Layering the cherriesScatter them on the first half of the mixture as directed rather than mixing them through; heavy candied fruit stirred into the whole batter sinks to the bottom during baking.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. "Serve at once" is not politeness — it will begin to fall within a few minutes of leaving the oven. A pouring cream or a thin vanilla sauce goes well with it.
Tapioca, the starch washed out of cassava root, reached northern kitchens through the colonial trade and by the late nineteenth century was a cheap, shelf-stable pantry staple sold in graded pearls. Cookbooks of this period lean on it heavily: it thickened without eggs or flour, kept well, and stretched a pint of milk into a dessert for several. Dressing it up with beaten whites and candied cherries is a familiar late-Victorian move of taking a nursery pudding and giving it a French name — "souffle" here promises lift rather than any relation to the cheese-and-bechamel kind.