Baked Indian Apple Tapioca Pudding (1918)
Reader ratingsA wheatless lunch-room pudding of 1918: cornmeal and tapioca cooked in milk with molasses and spice, poured over sliced apples and baked slowly, with no egg.
- Recipe makes
- 6 servings of about 4 oz
- Prep
- Cook
- Total
The tapioca soaks for 2 hours; start cooking the cornmeal in the milk halfway through the soak, since that takes an hour too. The pudding then bakes for up to 2 hours and rests for half an hour before serving.
Baked cornmeal and tapioca pudding over sliced apples, with a jug of cream.
The story behind the recipe
Baked Indian apple tapioca pudding is cornmeal and tapioca cooked in milk with molasses and spice, poured over sliced apples and baked slowly. It is the second baked pudding in Bertha E. Nettleton’s One Hundred-Portion War Time Recipes (1918), printed directly under her plain Baked Indian Pudding (1918), and like that one it is made without wheat flour or egg and sweetened with molasses alone.
How is it different from the plain pudding?
The two recipes share a page, a four-ounce portion and a base of cornmeal, milk and molasses, in different amounts. The apple pudding takes half the cornmeal of the plain one and makes up the body with twelve ounces of tapioca. It uses eight quarts of milk to the plain pudding’s thirteen, and two quarts of molasses to its two and three-quarters. Four quarts of sliced apples take the place of the raisins, and four ounces of butterine the place of a pound and a half of ground beef suet. Butterine was a margarine: Fannie Farmer’s 1896 cookbook names “Butterine and oleomargarine” among the products to use where butter could not be afforded, and the story of America’s margarine laws follows what went into it.
Nettleton gives the pudding two endings. It goes to the table with cream or with Sterling Sauce, which her sauce chapter makes from butter, brown sugar, thin cream, cinnamon and nutmeg, the cream beaten in a little at a time “as in making Mayonnaise.” Her four ounces are a portion of pudding; the book doesn’t say whether the sauce counts in it.
How Did You Feed a Hundred People Without Wheat in 1918? describes the hundred-portion kitchen it was written for and the 1918 rules it cooked under.
Read more about this recipe
Making it today
The book doesn’t say what tapioca it means. It soaks it “two hours or more,” which suits pearl tapioca, so we use small pearl tapioca and soak it in the refrigerator. Instant or quick-cooking tapioca is a different product and needs no soak. The book also names no vessel for the hour of cooking the cornmeal in milk; we borrow the double boiler from the plain pudding above it.
Butterine is listed with no step for adding it. We use butter in its place and stir it in with the molasses. The amounts are a sixteenth of the book’s, the same share as our plain pudding, and the apples are weighed where the book measures them sliced, by the quart. Its “slow oven” for “two hours” is our 300°F (150°C) for 1½ to 2 hours, since this smaller batch sits in a smaller dish. We serve it with cream.
Soak tapioca two hours or more and drain. Scald cornmeal in milk one hour, add tapioca and seasonings. ...
Recipe makes: 6 servings of about 4 oz
Ingredients
For 6 servings of about 4 oz. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for 6 servings of about 4 oz.
Pudding
- Small pearl tapioca0.75 oz
- Whole milk16 fl oz
- Yellow cornmeal1 oz
- Tart apples, peeled, cored and thinly sliced4 oz
- Molasses4 fl oz
- Ground cinnamon1/8 tsp
- Ground nutmeg1/3 tsp
- Salt1/3 tsp
- Butter1 1/2 tsp
- Butter for the dish1 tsp
To serve
- Light cream6 fl oz
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 0.75 oz small pearl tapioca
- 16 fl oz whole milk
- 1 oz yellow cornmeal
- 4 oz tart apples, peeled, cored and thinly sliced
- 4 fl oz molasses
- ⅛ tsp ground cinnamon
- ⅓ tsp ground nutmeg
- ⅓ tsp salt
- 1½ tsp butter
- 1 tsp butter for the dish
- 6 fl oz light cream
Equipment
Small bowl
Fine sieve
Double boiler, or a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water
Whisk
1-quart baking dish
Instructions
Put the tapioca in the small bowl, cover it well with cold water and refrigerate for 2 hours, or for as long as the package says. Drain it in the sieve.
About an hour before the tapioca is ready, heat the milk in the top of the double boiler over simmering water until steaming. Whisk in the cornmeal in a thin stream.
Cook over the simmering water for 1 hour, stirring every 10 minutes, until the mixture is thick and smooth and the cornmeal is no longer gritty. Check now and then that the water underneath hasn’t boiled away.
Heat the oven to 300°F (150°C). Grease the baking dish with the butter for the dish and lay the apples over the bottom.
Stir the drained tapioca, molasses, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and butter into the hot cornmeal until the butter has melted and the color is even. Pour it over the apples.
Bake for 1½ to 2 hours, until the top is deep brown, the tapioca pearls have turned clear and the apples are soft when pierced with a thin knife. The center stays slightly soft and firms as it cools.
Leave it to rest for 30 minutes, then spoon it into bowls warm and pour a little cream over each serving.
Nutrition
180calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- 6 servings of about 4 oz
- Servings
- 6
Estimated per serving from USDA FoodData Central values for the listed ingredients, leaving out the cream to serve.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
This is one sixteenth of the book’s recipe for a hundred 4-ounce portions. Keep the dish deep enough that the pudding stands at least 2 inches over the apples.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the servings.
Use a tart apple that softens in baking, and ordinary light or dark molasses; blackstrap is stronger and more bitter. If the pearls are still white and hard at the end of baking, give the pudding another 15 minutes.
Contains milk. Refrigerate leftovers in a shallow covered container within 2 hours and eat within 3 to 4 days; reheat to 165°F (74°C).
Scaling changes the ingredients only; pan sizes and cooking times need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.
Sources and attribution
After Bertha E. Nettleton, One Hundred-Portion War Time Recipes (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1918), Baked Indian Apple Tapioca Pudding
See the original pages (scan at Internet Archive) (opens in a new tab)