‘Nothing will surely ever taste so hateful as nursery tapioca,’ wrote Elizabeth David. She’s not alone in her hatred of the stuff: tapioca pudding has become a shorthand for those childhood dishes we look back on with horror.
It’s exactly those dishes that I’m trying to restore to their former glory – if such a glory ever existed. In fact, the first recipe I wrote in these pages was about blancmange, an attempt to persuade readers that that school dinner staple was worth a revisit. From there, rice pudding was a similar challenge and made way for jam roly-poly, spotted dick and cornflake tart.
Though I’ve had tapioca pudding on my dish list for some time, I haven’t been brave enough to give it a go. You see, there are always rice-pudding naysayers and spotted-dick sniggerers, but there are equally evangelists of those same puddings. I’m not sure the same can be said of tapioca: it was pretty much universally loathed. Can tapioca be rehabilitated?
There is hope: other cultures don’t have the same problem with the texture of tapioca. Che chuoi is a Vietnamese pudding made with tapioca cooked in coconut milk and served with banana; tambo-tambo is a Filipino tapioca dessert also made with coconut milk, but served with mango. A classic Cantonese treatment of tapioca is to cook it into a custard and then bake it under a pineapple bun-style pastry crust.
In Britain, tapioca sits in the class of milk puddings – rice pudding, semolina, arrowroot pudding, macaroni pudding – all of which are simmered in sweet milk until soft, thickening the milk around them.
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