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Veal and Sago Soup
2 1/2 lbs. lean veal 3 quarts cold water 1/4 lb. pearl sago 2 cups scalded milk Yolks 4 eggs Salt and pepper Order meat from market, very finely chopped. Pick over and remove particles of fat. Cover meat with water, bring slowly to boiling-point, and simmer two hours, skimming occasionally; strain and reheat. Soak sago one-half hour in enough cold water to cover, stir into hot stock, boil thirty minutes, and add milk; then pour mixture slowly on yolks of eggs, slightly beaten. Season with salt and pepper.
A clear veal broth thickened twice over, first with sago and then with an egg-yolk liaison. The liaison is the hinge: once the yolks go in the soup must never return to a boil.
- Egg yolksBeat the four yolks in a warmed bowl and add the hot soup in a thin stream, whisking constantly, then return the whole to the pot over the lowest heat only long enough to thicken. If it boils the yolks curdle and the soup turns grainy.
- "Very finely chopped" vealThe butcher's fine chop is what we now buy as ground veal. Ask for lean shoulder ground once; it gives up its flavour far faster than a whole piece, which is the point of chopping it.
- Pearl sagoSago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls in Asian and South Asian groceries. A quarter pound is roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup dry. Small pearl tapioca is the usual stand-in and behaves much the same.
- Sago timingThirty minutes suits the coarse sago of the period; modern pearls are often finer and may be done well before that. Cook until no white centre remains and stop there, or they dissolve into paste.
- Cold water startBeginning in cold water and bringing it slowly up draws out soluble protein as scum that can be skimmed off. Once it boils hard the stock will cloud and no amount of straining fixes it.
- Scalded milkScalding meant heating to just below a simmer; it is usually explained as a way of killing souring organisms in unpasteurised milk. With today's milk it serves only to keep the soup from being chilled down; whole milk is what the recipe assumes.
- YieldSome reduction takes place over the two hours, and two cups of milk go back in at the end, so the finished soup lands somewhere around two to two and a half quarts.
- SeasoningSeason at the very end. Two hours of reduction concentrates any salt added early, and the milk and yolks blunt pepper, so taste after the liaison is in.
Sago soups belong to the invalid-and-convalescent tradition that runs through late nineteenth-century American cookery, where veal was prized precisely because it was mild, pale and thought easy to digest. Sago itself reached British and American kitchens through the East Indies trade and was for decades shelved beside arrowroot and tapioca as a starch for the sickroom and the nursery; cookbooks of the period often used the three interchangeably. The finishing liaison of egg yolks and scalded milk is straightforward French technique, borrowed into the domestic-science kitchens that produced books like this one, where a soup was expected to be nourishing first and interesting second.