Apple Sago
Use the same proportions of Larkin Sago and water as used above. Prepare in the same way, adding one-half cup of sugar. Put six sour apples, pared and quartered, in the bottom of a buttered pudding-mold. Pour the sago over these and bake in moderate oven until apples are soft.
A simple baked sago pudding whose proportions live in the recipe above it in the original book; the usual ratio for that era is about half a cup of pearl sago to a quart of water, cooked until translucent before it goes over the fruit.
- The missing proportions"The same proportions as used above" refers to the preceding sago recipe, which is not on this page. Period sago puddings generally run 1/2 cup sago to 4 cups water or milk; without the source recipe the exact figure is genuinely unknowable, so treat that as a starting point rather than a conversion.
- Cook the sago firstThis is the hinge. Pearl sago must be simmered or soaked until the grains turn from opaque white to clear before it is poured over the apples, or the pudding bakes into a gritty layer of hard centres. Raw sago will not hydrate properly in the oven.
- Larkin SagoA house brand of the Larkin Company of Buffalo, which sold groceries alongside its soap and premiums. Any pearl sago works; small-pearl tapioca is the closest widely available substitute and behaves almost identically.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' in this period is generally read as roughly 350-375F. The apples, not the sago, set the timing.
- Sour applesA firm tart cooking apple — Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy. Sweet dessert apples collapse and make the pudding watery, and the half cup of sugar assumes fruit with real acidity.
- Pudding-moldAny deep straight-sided baking dish; six apples plus the cooked sago will want a good two quarts of capacity. Butter it well: sago sticks hard once it caramelises at the edges.
- Timing and yieldReckon 45 minutes to an hour in a moderate oven, until a knife slides through the apple quarters without resistance and the sago is set and glossy. Six apples serves six.
- ServingThe original gives no accompaniment. Puddings of this sort were commonly served warm, often with cream or a thin custard.
Good Things to Eat belongs to the family of promotional cookbooks issued by the Larkin Company, the Buffalo soap manufacturer that built an enormous mail-order grocery and household business on the premium system — which explains why the sago in this recipe carries a brand name. Sago itself is starch extracted from the pith of tropical palms, imported through Southeast Asian trade routes and sold in Western kitchens as small hard pearls from the eighteenth century onward. It was valued as a cheap thickener and as invalid food, gentle and bland, and by the late nineteenth century it had settled into the dessert repertoire in exactly this form: a starch pudding baked over fruit, the sago doing the work that flour or breadcrumbs might do elsewhere. Tapioca, drawn from cassava, largely displaced it in American cooking over the following decades, and recipes like this one are the reason pearl tapioca puddings still taste faintly of the same idea.