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Sago Pudding, Baked
Wash three table-spoonfuls of sago, and soak it for an hour in half a pint of cold water. Meantime put a pint and a half of milk into a saucepan with a little lemon-rind, an inch of stick cinnamon, or an ounce of blanched and pounded almonds, and let it simmer gently till it is pleasantly flavoured. Strain and sweeten; mix with it the soaked sago drained from the water, and simmer gently, stirring frequently till the preparation is thick. Let it cool, then add two well-beaten eggs and a slice of fresh butter, and beat it again for a few minutes. Pour it into a buttered pie-dish, and bake until the surface is brightly browned. Serve with wine sauce. If a superior pudding is required, four eggs may be used instead of two, and the dish may be lined with puff-paste before the sago is poured into it. Time to bake the pudding, from three-quarters of an hour to an hour. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain milk-and-starch pudding of the kind Victorian cooks made weekly. Nothing here is difficult, but the measures are imperial and the oven direction is missing entirely.
- Let it cool before the eggs go inThis is the hinge. Adding beaten egg to hot sago scrambles it and gives a grainy, weeping pudding. Bring the thickened sago down to hand-warm, then beat in the eggs and butter.
- Imperial liquid measuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of soaking water is about 1 1/4 US cups, and a pint and a half of milk is 30 imperial fl oz, roughly 28 3/4 US fl oz or about 3 1/2 US cups. Whole milk gives the intended texture.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A pudding of this sort belongs in a moderate oven, 350F, for the stated 45 minutes to an hour, until set with a browned surface. If the top colours before the centre sets, drop to 325F.
- Sago itselfPearl sago is starch from the sago palm, sold in Asian and South Asian groceries. Small pearl tapioca is the closest substitute in equal volume; three tablespoons in this quantity of milk gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm one.
- Soaking is not optionalThe hour in cold water hydrates the pearls so they cook through in the milk. Skipped, you get chalky centres that stay hard no matter how long the pudding bakes.
- Flavouring the milkUse pared lemon zest with no white pith, and strain the milk before sweetening. Sugar is unspecified: 2 to 3 tablespoons suits most modern palates. The "or" indicates the ounce of blanched almonds stands in place of the cinnamon (and perhaps the lemon) rather than being added to it, though the phrasing is ambiguous.
- The puff-paste versionLining the dish with pastry under a wet filling tends to give a soft base. Blind-bake the lining first if you want it, or bake the pudding plain.
- Wine sauce and yieldThe period sauce is sweetened wine thickened with a little butter and flour, or simply sherry beaten into melted butter and sugar. The pudding serves five or six, as stated, and is best warm rather than hot.
Sago reached British kitchens as a colonial import, starch washed from the pith of palms grown in the Malay archipelago and Borneo, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it sat on grocers' shelves beside tapioca, arrowroot and semolina as one of the cheap thickening starches that made milk stretch into a family pudding. Cassell's gives the cost as ninepence for five or six people, which places it firmly in the economical column, and the note that "a superior pudding" needs four eggs and a puff-paste lining shows how such recipes were written to be scaled up or down with the household's means. Sago and tapioca puddings also carried a long association with invalid cookery and the nursery, being bland, soft and easily digested, which is part of why they attracted the unaffectionate nicknames that later generations of British schoolchildren gave them.