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SAGO CUSTARD
Soak two table-spoons sago in a tumbler of water an hour or more, then boil in same water until clear, and add a tumbler of sweet milk; when it boils, add sugar to taste, then a beaten egg and flavoring.
A thin, spoonable invalid pudding from the sickroom chapter, closer to a drinkable gruel than a baked custard. Two conversions and one technique point carry the whole recipe.
- A tumblerA drinking tumbler was commonly reckoned at about half a pint, roughly 8 fl oz, so read this as about 2 tablespoons sago, 1 cup water and 1 cup milk.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk also kept in a nineteenth-century kitchen.
- SagoStarch pearls from the pith of tropical sago palms, still sold in Asian and South Asian groceries. Small pearl tapioca is the closest substitute and behaves the same way; instant or minute tapioca does not, as it needs no soaking and will turn to paste.
- Boil until clearThis is the real instruction. The pearls go from opaque white to translucent with no chalky centre, typically after a good while of gentle simmering with stirring. Get them soft before the milk and egg go in, since the mixture cannot be boiled hard afterwards.
- Adding the eggDo not tip a beaten egg into a boiling pan. Pull it off the heat, stir a few spoonfuls of the hot sago into the egg to temper it, then return everything and cook over low heat, stirring, until it thickens slightly and reaches about 170F. Above roughly 180F the egg curdles and the custard turns grainy.
- FlavoringLikely a few drops of vanilla or lemon extract, a scrape of nutmeg, or a spoonful of sherry or brandy. 'Sugar to taste' is unquantified; about 1 to 2 tablespoons suits this volume.
- Yield and servingMakes about two cups, or two small servings. It was served warm or barely cool; it sets further as it chills, so thin it with a little milk if it stiffens in the refrigerator.
Sago and tapioca puddings sit in the "Food for the Sick" chapters of nineteenth-century American cookbooks because starch thinned with milk was thought to be the most digestible thing that could still be called nourishing. Sago, the extracted pith starch of several tropical palms, reached Northern kitchens through the colonial trade and was said to be sold by druggists as well as by grocers, alongside arrowroot, isinglass and pearl barley, which appear in the same chapter for the same reason. Recipes like this one are notable for what they lack: no thickening flour, almost no fat, a single egg for substance. Buckeye Cookery, first published in Marysville, Ohio, and issued in Minneapolis in 1877 and expanded through many later printings, is conventionally described as compiled largely from contributions by Ohio housewives, and its sickroom section reflects a period when nursing a fever at home for weeks was the ordinary case rather than the exception.