Week Fifteen – Tapioca Pudding

After last week’s jaunt into the world of school dinners of days gone by, I was going to hunt down a can of tapioca and give it the food first treatment. Well, I was actually going to allow it to give me the food first treatment…  Or something like that.

Is anyone still reading?

This was until a trip to Morrison’s Supermarket on Friday almost saw the tapioca plan usurped by a pig’s trotter.  I happened to notice it in the refrigerated ‘almost out of date’ section, picked it up and moved it in the direction of the basket.  I was then definitively instructed to put it back by my girlfriend – who added “There is no way on earth that you are going to put that in my fridge” for good measure.

I thought about protesting, but being a very obliging person I returned the trotter to the shelf.   I think she had foreseen that I was likely to chase her around her flat pretending I had one normal hand and one pig hand.  I guess she knows me too well.  Actually, I should probably change that to she knows me well enough to predict that that was the sort of thing I would do.  Shocking, isn’t it?

The pig trotter would have to wait for another day – And a more tolerant audience…

Consequently, this week’s food first is Tapioca Pudding

Ambrosia had definitely cornered the old school dinners section of the puddings market

 As explained last week, I had managed to avoid eating school dinners for my whole journey through the education system.   This is how I had never eaten culinary delights such as semolina and tapioca pudding…

I got myself a can of tapioca from the supermarket – It was made by Ambrosia, who, somewhat strangely, seems to have cornered the market for puddings that used to appear frequently on school lunchtime menus.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to eating it for a number of reasons: –

• Tapioca dubiously sits atop a BBC Good Food magazine survey I mentioned last week.
• I have regularly seen it referred to as ‘frogspawn’ – Because that’s apparently what it looks like. The can I have has no pictures on it for reference, which is probably not too much of a surprise if it resembles gelatinous amphibian ova.
• A number of those websites where you can ask people questions about things you don’t know the answer to – but rather oddly never think to search for the answer via Google (other search engines are available) – have enquired if tapioca contains fish eggs.

Obviously, tapioca isn’t going to contain fish eggs and the people who have been under the impression that it does probably deserve some of the answers they have been given… The best one was “Does it smell fishy? No, then it doesn’t.  Fish eggs smell like fish!”  You can’t really argue with sarcastic logic like that.

Tapioca is actually made from starch extracted from cassava which is then mixed with lots of milk and sugar, then gently stirred and heated until puddingified.

If you’ve read some of this blog before, you will know I am quite often prone to drift off at a tangent.  Well, congratulations if you had picked now for me to do so in your office sweepstake…

[INSERT GOING OFF AT A TANGENT HERE]

I have had two dalliances with cassava in the past – The first was when I was in Kenya.  I was invited to try some in a village market.  It was chopped into cubes sprinkled with a bright red spicy powder.  I’m pretty sure it was served raw – Its crunchiness suggested  that.  I have to say it was really nice – So nice, in fact, that on my return to the UK I hunted some down in a supermarket (My second dalliance).  I took the brown root-like cassava home and did a little research on the internet as to how best to prepare it. To my consternation, I found that if not prepared properly (soaked and/or cooked) cassava contains enough cyanide to cause vertigo, vomiting, collapse and quite often death. On reflection, it was unlikely I ate it raw, but if I had, I didn’t want to ruin a lucky escape by mis-preparing at home and self-inflict dizziness, throwing-up, falling over and then dying. I was no fool and that would be foolish.   My supermarket-bought cassava sat on the kitchen worktop until it started to decompose – probably throwing cyanide spores into the atmosphere – and was then put in the food composter.

 [END TANGENT]

Does it smell like fish?

I opened the can of tapioca and spooned a portion into a bowl.  Yes, I suppose it did look like it contained eggs of some sort.  It didn’t smell of fish, so I ruled out fish eggs (thanks to information gained from Ask Jeeves or equivalent).  It pretty much smelled like semolina.  The taste was pretty much like semolina too.  In fact, the only discernible difference was the presence of the little tapioca pearls – These just added a bit of texture, similar to the rice in rice pudding.

I would gladly eat tapioca again and am really surprised as to how it can be such a hated food. I can only reason that a lot of people just didn’t like school and that tapioca is a reminder of school.

Mrs Frog was going to struggle with motherhood…  Much like the author of the book was struggling with a lack of apostrophes!

I’ll leave you with the words of Alan Davidson, who, in his book The Oxford Companion to Food (1999), asserts that tapioca is “sometimes despised by the ignorant… That is to say persons who have no knowledge of how good it is when properly made.”

Well, that’s the first time anyone has described me (albeit indirectly) as non-ignorant. I’ll raise a bowl of frogspawn to that!

See you next week…  (You may well get some pictures of me with one pig trotter hand – If you are lucky).