Tapioca

Last night I hedgehogged around my friend MC's kitchen, with NPR turned up loud. I had a package of tapioca and had decided to make pudding. I forgot how easy it is -- an egg, some milk, the tapioca, some sugar, and a splash of vanilla. I stirred it with a whisk, watching it thicken, watching the little fish eyes of tapioca appear. I love the moment when you're stirring something and it suddenly thickens. I think the last time I made something that thickened was making homemade cheese for an Indian food feast back in July. It's magic, the way a liquid can change around your spoon.

While the pudding was cooling in the refrigerator I flipped listlessly through MC's four television channels, knowing there would be very little news. It was a little bit absurd, how many ways the television announcers had of saying there was no news. "I want to report on a very interesting Senate race here in [state]," a blow-dried person would say. "This has been very hard-fought, with the candidates spending a great deal of money in the final days just before the election. And right now it's just too close to call." Public television had a special about Mt. Kilimanjaro, which seemed impossible to me. We watched that for a little while, before I irritably changed the channel. I ate Pringles. I thought about making macaroni and cheese, for some additional comfort food, but instead curled up in a blanket and kept changing the channel.

The tapioca, when we ate it, was still a little bit warm. It had thickened on top -- not quite a skin but a distinct, slightly glue-y, surface tension. Inside it was smooth and warm, sweet and thick and bland and vanilla-soft. We watched local candidates unwilling to concede races that they'd lost by a landslide. Jim Lehrer came on. I scraped the bottom of my bowl. I fell asleep in an uncomfortable position, with the television telling me all the things it still didn't know.

Comments

[Rich]

Mmmmm.....glue-y surface tension.

In this horrible day of political waste, in which we choose the dumbest possible man to lead our country, I tried your comfort food idea, and it worked.

[Yeoman Lawyer]

My mother, a horrible cook, used to make Tapioca when I was a kid. She did that well. I've always loved it. I make it now maybe once a year, sometimes when I'm sick for some reason. It's great.