Tapioca: Not just a bland pudding

Happy National Tapioca Day! I remember tapioca from childhood mainly as the weirdest pudding (made more edible by stirring in a big spoonful of chocolate Quik) and as Glop, one of those weird midwestern concoctions that my grandma made and served as dessert, though I imagine it counted as a salad at some people's houses. (It did have pineapple and pecans in it! That's enough to count as a salad in some circles.)

You can easily find tapioca pudding in just about any vintage cookbook, but today's recipes from American Home All-Purpose Cookbook (ed. Virginia T. Habeeb and the food staff of American Home, 1966) remind us that tapioca was a pretty common thickener in pies, too. 

I'm used to seeing strawberry and rhubarb ream up, but this book offers a lesser-known couple: Rhubarb Cherry Pie.

That one is good for late spring/ early summer-- perfect for Tapioca Day!

If you want to keep the tapioca party going a little later in the summer, there's a Deep-Dish Plum Pie.

I really hope the plums are small since they're only halved! I can just imagine trying to figure out how to at least semi-gracefully deal with a big slab of plum tumbling out of the pastry. 

And then for even later in the season-- if you really want to keep the tapioca fun-- we have Colonial Grape Pie.

And now I understand why I rarely see recipes for grape pie in old cookbooks. This one seems like a lot of work, what with stemming and skinning 2-1/2 pounds of Concord grapes, then cooking and sieving the pulp to get rid of the seeds, re-adding the skins to the pulp, and doing some more cooking before finally turning the whole mess into a pie shell and trying to give it a lattice top crust when the filling is still pretty hot. It's way easier just to make a pumpkin pie or pudding pie. (Or a fruit pie if you can just plunk the filling out of the can and into a waiting pie shell!)

Just thinking about tapioca is as far as I'm going to go for this holiday, though. That's about as festive as I get these days.