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Upton Pudding
Butter a pie-dish thickly, and put into it a tea-cupful of large-grained sago. Add two table-spoonfuls of sugar and a little grated lemon or nutmeg. Nearly fill the dish with boiling water (milk is better if it is to be had). Pare and core two large apples, and slice them into the pudding; place a lump of butter upon it, and bake in a gentle oven. This pudding may be eaten cold or hot. Time to bake the pudding, about two hours. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A frugal baked sago pudding that cooks unattended for two hours; the only real technique is getting the ratio of grain to liquid right.
- SagoLarge-grained (pearl) sago is starch from the sago palm, sold in Asian and Caribbean groceries; pearl tapioca of the same size behaves almost identically. Do not substitute the fine powdered kind, which turns to glue.
- A tea-cupfulIn Victorian cookery books a teacup is usually reckoned at a quarter-pint to about 6 fl oz, so roughly three-quarters of a modern cup. The dish is then "nearly filled" with liquid, which will come to several times the volume of the sago — pearl sago swells enormously.
- "A gentle oven"300 to 325F. The long slow bake is what lets the grains hydrate all the way through; at a hotter temperature the top sets and the centre stays gritty.
- Milk over waterThe parenthetical is right — milk gives body and a custard-like set, water gives a translucent, rather thin pudding. Whole milk, scalded, is closest to what the author meant.
- Dish and depthUse a shallow buttered pie-dish of about 1.5 quarts. A skin will form on a milk version; stir it in once at the half-hour mark if you want an even texture, or leave it.
- ApplesA firm cooking apple that holds its shape — Bramley collapses to sauce over two hours, which is not unpleasant but is a different pudding. Slice them thin so they finish with the sago.
- Yield and servingFive or six as written. Good cold, when it sets to a sliceable consistency; hot it wants cream or a spoonful of jam, as the sweetening here is modest at two tablespoons.
Sago puddings were staples of the nineteenth-century English nursery and sickroom, valued because the starch was cheap, bland and thought easy to digest — the sixpence quoted here for five or six servings was the point of the recipe as much as the flavour. The sago itself came from palm pith processed in the Malay archipelago and shipped to Britain in bulk through the second half of the century, arriving in kitchens as "pearl" grains alongside tapioca and arrowroot in the general class of what cookery writers called farinaceous foods. The name is generally taken from Upton, of which there are many in England, and no particular one can be documented as the source. What the recipe really records is the household logic of the era: butter the dish, add grain, sugar, spice and whatever liquid you have, put it in the falling heat of an oven already used for something else, and forget it for two hours.