Home › Puddings and Sauces › Sago and Apple Pudding
Sago and Apple Pudding
Pare six apples and punch out the cores, fill holes with cinnamon and sugar, using two tea-spoons cinnamon to a cup of sugar; take . one table-spoon sago to each apple, wash it thoroughly and let soak an hour in water enough to cover the apples, pour water and sago over the apples, and bake an hour and a half.
A plain baked apple dessert thickened by the sago that surrounds it. The whole thing rests on the sago being soaked long enough to soften, and on baking slowly enough for the pearls to turn clear.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature at all, only "bake an hour and a half." A moderate oven, around 350F, suits that timing for whole apples sitting in liquid; judge by the sago turning translucent and the apples collapsing at the shoulders.
- What sago isStarch extracted from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls. It behaves much like small pearl tapioca, which is the usual modern substitute in equal measure. Instant or minute tapioca is not interchangeable here, as it needs no soaking and will dissolve to paste.
- Soak, do not skipUnsoaked sago stays gritty in the centre no matter how long it bakes. An hour in cold water is the minimum, and the soaking water goes into the dish, not down the drain, since it carries dissolved starch.
- The ambiguous quantity"Water enough to cover the apples" gives no absolute measure: the sago soaks in water whose volume is set by reference to the apples, so the amount depends on how snugly the fruit is packed. Err toward less; sago thickens considerably and a flooded dish will not set.
- Choosing applesUse a firm baking variety that holds its shape, such as Braeburn or a good Rome. Softer dessert apples will slump into the sago before the pearls have cleared.
- The fillingTwo teaspoons cinnamon to a cup of sugar is a strong mix, and six cored apples will not take a whole cup. Make the mixture, fill the cavities, and scatter what remains over the top.
- Coring"Punch out the cores" means an apple corer through the stem end, leaving the fruit whole. Leave the bottom half-inch intact so the sugar does not run straight out into the liquid.
- Yield and servingSix apples, one each. Serve warm with cream or a thin custard; the sago sets to a soft jelly as it cools and is best not chilled hard.
Sago reached Victorian and American kitchens through the colonial trade in palm starch from Southeast Asia, and by the 1870s it sat on grocers' shelves beside tapioca, arrowroot and cornstarch as one of the cheap thickeners that let a household stretch fruit into a full pudding. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Minneapolis in 1877 from contributions by Ohio and Minnesota housewives, is full of this kind of economy: six apples, a spoonful of starch apiece, and a slow oven that could share heat with whatever else was baking. Sago was also standard invalid food in the period, valued as bland and easily digested, which is part of why it turns up so often in the pudding chapters of nineteenth-century books. It fell out of American use in the twentieth century as tapioca, made from cassava, took over the same role.