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SAGO, WITH WINE SAUCE (a German recipe)
Take a quarter of a pound of sago, and boil it in a pint of water with the peel of a lemon till it is quite boiled out; add a little white wine, sugar, and cinnamon. Stir the preparation till it becomes thin, then let it boil a little longer, and remove the peel and cinnamon. Pour the sago out to cool in a deep plate; when cold cut it into shapes, and place in the dish which is to appear at table. Pour over them a sauce composed of wine, sugar, cinnamon, and grated lemon-peel. If preferred, the juice of fruit may be used instead of wine.
A moulded sago pudding, set firm, cut into shapes and served cold under a sweet wine sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions decide whether it slices or slumps.
- The hinge: cook it far longer than seems reasonable"Till it is quite boiled out" means until the pearls have lost their opaque white centres entirely and the mass is translucent and thick. Undercooked sago sets into a gritty jelly with chalky specks and will not hold a clean cut.
- Weights and measuresA quarter pound of sago is about 115 g, roughly two-thirds of a cup of pearls. The pint is an imperial one, 20 fl oz or 2 1/2 US cups; with a US 16 oz pint the mixture will be stiff and prone to catching.
- Sago itselfTrue sago is starch from the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls in Asian and South Asian groceries. Pearl tapioca of the same size behaves much like it and is the easier substitute; instant or minute tapioca is unlikely to give a mixture firm enough to cut cleanly.
- "Stir till it becomes thin"This reads oddly. Adding wine and sugar loosens a stiff starch paste, and the further boiling drives off some liquid again before it is moulded. Expect a mixture that just falls thickly from the spoon, not a pourable one.
- Unmeasured wine and sugarThe original gives no quantities for either the added wine or the sauce. For the pudding, a few tablespoons of white wine and 2-3 tablespoons of sugar to this quantity is a sane starting point; taste before moulding, since cold starch reads less sweet than hot.
- Setting and cuttingThe "deep plate" is a shallow bowl or plate with a rim, used as a mould. Pour to about an inch deep, chill until firm, then cut with a knife or a small cutter. Wetting the blade keeps the edges clean.
- The sauceWine, sugar, cinnamon and lemon zest warmed together until the sugar dissolves, then cooled or served just warm. It is not thickened. Fruit juice, as the recipe allows, gives a version suitable for children or anyone avoiding alcohol, which barely cooks off here.
- YieldProbably four as a light cold pudding; the original gives no number.
Sago reached British and German kitchens as a colonial import, starch extracted from the pith of palms grown in the Malay archipelago, and by the mid-nineteenth century it sat alongside arrowroot and tapioca in the invalid cookery chapters of household books. Its reputation was medicinal as much as culinary: bland, easily digested, recommended for the sick and for children, which places it among the plain thickened puddings rather than the showy ones. What marks this out as a German recipe is the treatment of the cooled pudding as something to be cut and dressed rather than spooned, and the sweet wine sauce spiced with cinnamon and lemon peel, a pairing common in German Weinsauce served over moulded grain and starch puddings. The permitted substitution of fruit juice for wine suggests the same dish could be offered in two registers, one for the dinner table and one for the nursery.