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SAGO JELLY-PUDDING
Wash thoroughly one tea-cup of sago, cook it in three pints of water fifteen or twenty minutes, till perfectly clear, add a very little salt; stir in half a jelly-glass of currant, grape or other jelly and two spoonfuls sugar. Mold and serve cold with cream and sugar; or, eat warm.
A thin starch pudding that sets as it cools, from the invalid-cookery chapter. Everything depends on cooking the sago until the pearls are genuinely translucent — any chalky white core at the center will stay gritty no matter how long the pudding chills.
- MeasuresA 19th-century tea-cup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, so figure roughly 3/4 cup of sago by volume to 6 cups (three pints) of water. That is a loose ratio: it thickens to a soft, spoonable jelly rather than a firm pudding.
- Jelly-glassJelly glasses of the period ran roughly 6 to 8 fluid ounces, so half a glass is somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 cup of jelly. The recipe has you stir it in after the sago has cooked.
- "Two spoonfuls sugar"Genuinely ambiguous in this book — tablespoons are the likelier reading, but taste after the jelly goes in, since currant and grape jellies are already sweet.
- Sago itselfStarch pearls from the sago palm, still sold in Asian groceries; small-pearl tapioca behaves similarly and is easier to find. Large sago pearls are often soaked before cooking, though the recipe itself calls only for thorough washing.
- Cooking timeFifteen to twenty minutes suits small pearls at a bare simmer with frequent stirring; large pearls can take 30 minutes or more. Judge by clarity, not the clock, and keep the heat low so the starch does not scorch on the pan bottom.
- MoldingRinse the mold with cold water before filling — the film of water helps release the set pudding. Chill several hours before turning out.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving four to six. It thickens further overnight and can be loosened with a little milk or water.
Buckeye Cookery devotes a whole chapter to invalid cookery, and this pudding is a fair specimen of what that meant in the 1870s: a bland, easily digested starch, thinned well past dessert consistency, with just enough fruit jelly to make it palatable to someone with no appetite. Sago — starch extracted from the pith of tropical palms — was used more or less interchangeably with tapioca and arrowroot in sickroom cookery, all three valued precisely because they tasted of nothing and made no demands. Medical advice of the period held that invalids should be fed "farinaceous" foods, and a household manual was expected to supply them alongside the roast beef; the currant jelly here does double duty, since jelly was itself a standard sickroom offering in Victorian nursing manuals. Serving the same preparation warm or cold, with cream, quietly moves it back to the family table once the patient recovers.