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Cream of Sago Soup
Soak half a cupful of sago for three hours in tepid water. Put in an inner boiler with a cupful of boiling water, and simmer until soft. Stir 2 tablespoonfuls of butter rolled in flour into 3 cupfuls of hot milk. Add this to the sago, beat up well, season with celery salt, pepper, and a little onion juice. Beat up well for two minutes, pour slowly upon 2 well-beaten eggs; set in boiling water for two minutes and pour out.
A late-Victorian cream soup thickened three ways at once: swollen sago, a butter-and-flour roll, and a final egg liaison. The liaison is the hinge, and the recipe gives it only a passing mention.
- The egg finishPour the hot soup onto the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking, then return it to gentle heat only. Above roughly 180F the eggs curdle and the soup turns grainy; an instant-read thermometer showing 160-170F gives a safely set, smooth liaison.
- Inner boilerThis is the upper pan of a double boiler. A heatproof bowl over simmering water does the same job, and it matters here because sago scorches easily on direct heat.
- SagoPearl sago is starch from the sago palm, sold in small dry pearls at Asian and South Asian groceries. Tapioca pearls of the same size are the closest substitute, though they are cassava starch and not identical; instant or minute tapioca does not work, as it dissolves rather than staying suspended.
- The soakThree hours in tepid water is not idle padding. Unsoaked pearls take much longer to hydrate and can stay chalky at the centre, leaving the soup gritty.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manie, not a cooked roux: work the 2 tablespoons of butter with flour (a tablespoon or two -- the recipe does not say) into a paste and whisk it into the hot milk in small pieces. Let the milk come to a bare simmer for a minute or two afterward to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, about a teaspoon. It gives sharpness without the specks; period books often call for it in pale soups.
- ConsistencySago keeps absorbing liquid as it stands and the soup will set almost to a pudding if held. Thin with hot milk just before serving.
- YieldRoughly four and a half cups, serving four as a first course.
Sago reached British and American kitchens through the colonial trade in the East Indies, where the pith of the sago palm is a staple starch, and by the nineteenth century it sat on grocers' shelves alongside tapioca and arrowroot as one of the standard "invalid" foods. Soups and puddings built on these starches were prescribed for the convalescent and the elderly because they were bland, soft and thought to be easily digested, and cream soups of this kind occupy a middle ground between medicine and the dinner table. The three-part thickening here, starch plus flour plus egg, is characteristic of the period's cream soups, which aimed at a body that modern cooking generally gets from cream or a puree of the vegetable itself.