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Sago Bread
One-fourth, or at most one-third, of sago is the best proportion to wheaten flour. Dissolve the sago for three hours in milk-warm water on a hob. Then mix as for common bread. The loaves should be baked in a slack oven for two hours, then allowed to grow stale, when the bread will be found excellent and economical.
A wartime-economy style formula rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already know how to mix, prove and shape a plain yeasted loaf, and only tells you what to do differently. The instructions that matter are the long soak and the slow bake.
- The hinge: soak the sago fullySago pearls are almost pure starch and will not hydrate in a dough. Three hours in warm (not hot) water swells and softens them so they gelatinise in the oven instead of staying as hard beads. Modern equivalent of "on a hob" is simply somewhere warm — the recipe's "milk-warm" is roughly blood heat, about 98F — not on direct heat.
- What sago isStarch extracted from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small dry pearls. Tapioca pearls of the same size behave very similarly and are far easier to find; both are pure starch with no gluten and no flavour of their own.
- ProportionsA quarter to a third of the total flour weight replaced by sago (the original's wording can also be read as one part sago to four of flour). Sago contributes no gluten, which is presumably why the original sets one-third as the limit; beyond that a rise becomes progressively harder to hold. For 500g of total dry weight, use 125-165g sago and the rest strong wheat flour.
- "Mix as for common bread"The book presumably assumes barm or fresh yeast and salt. Reckon on about 1.5 per cent salt and 1 per cent instant yeast by flour weight; the recipe does not say what becomes of the soaking water, but draining the sago and keeping the water for mixing is reasonable, since it carries dissolved starch.
- A slack ovenConventionally glossed as around 300-325F, though period usage varied. The two-hour bake is not a mistake: this is a wet, starch-heavy loaf that needs long, gentle heat to set through. A tin loaf of ordinary size will be done well before that, so bake to an internal temperature of 205-210F rather than to the clock.
- Why let it grow staleFreshly baked starch loaves are gummy and difficult to slice. A day of cooling and staling lets the gelatinised starch firm up, which is why the recipe insists on it. This bread is best on the second day and excellent toasted.
- Expect a dense crumbThe result is close-textured and pale, closer to a good potato bread than to a modern white loaf. Judged against a standard sandwich loaf it will seem heavy.
Sago reached British kitchens through the Southeast Asian trade and was, for much of the nineteenth century, a nursery and invalid food — sago pudding, sago gruel, sago in beef tea. Its appearance here as a bread extender belongs to a different tradition: the long British preoccupation with stretching wheaten flour, which ran through the dearths of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and produced a whole literature of loaves eked out with potato, rice, barley, oatmeal and imported starches. The recipe calls the result "economical" without apology. The instruction to let the loaf grow stale before eating sits easily with a period in which household baking was often done only once or twice a week, so that bread was seldom eaten warm.