Grape Sago
Wash one cup of Larkin Sago and soak in three cups of cold water for two hours. Cook until transparent and add one cup of grape-juice and one cup of sugar. When cool turn in a mold and serve very cold. Currant jelly may be substituted for the grape-juice by thinning a tumbler of the jelly with one cup of boiling water.
A cold molded pudding that sets on the starch in the sago alone, with no gelatin and no eggs. The original assumes you know what cooked sago looks like, which is the only difficult part.
- Larkin Sago is just pearl sagoLarkin was a brand name, not a variety. Use plain pearl sago from an Asian or South Asian grocer; small pearl tapioca behaves almost identically, though it is slightly stickier and clears a little faster.
- The hinge: cook until genuinely transparentEvery pearl must lose its white center, which takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer after the two-hour soak. Pearls pulled while still chalky stay gritty in the cold pudding and no amount of chilling will fix them.
- Low heat and frequent stirringSago starch settles and scorches on the bottom of the pan. A heavy saucepan over low heat, stirred every couple of minutes, is what the original writer took for granted.
- Add the grape juice off the boilStir in the juice and sugar once the pearls are clear and the pan is off the heat. Prolonged boiling after the acid goes in thins the set and dulls the color.
- A tumbler of jellyIn this period a tumbler of jelly is the standard small jelly glass, roughly six to eight ounces. Thinned with a cup of boiling water it makes about two cups of liquid, rather more than the single cup of grape-juice it replaces, and it brings considerable sugar of its own, so reduce the added cup of sugar accordingly and taste as you go.
- Grape juice then and nowBottled unfermented grape juice varied a good deal in sweetness. Taste before adding the full cup of sugar; a tart 100 percent Concord juice will need it, a sweetened cocktail-style juice will not.
- Molding and unmoldingRinse the mold in cold water and do not oil it. Chill at least four hours; to turn it out, dip the mold to the rim in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a cold plate.
- Yield and servingThe recipe's quantities come to appreciably more than a quart of pudding, enough for six or so. Such cold starch puddings were often served with plain cream or a thin custard sauce poured around the base.
Sago is the starch washed from the pith of tropical palms, chiefly the sago palm of Southeast Asia, and it reached American kitchens as a cheap, shelf-stable thickener sold alongside tapioca and cornstarch. Recipes like this one belong to the great age of the molded dessert, when a cook without refrigeration beyond an icebox could still put something glossy and cold on the table using nothing but starch and time. The brand name in the ingredient line is the tell: this comes from the world of the Larkin Company of Buffalo, the mail-order soap and grocery firm whose customers bought household goods through buying clubs and received premiums, cookbooks among them, so the recipes name the company's own pantry stock. The alternative given at the end, a tumbler of currant jelly let down with boiling water, is a reminder that home-put-up jelly was the default fruit flavoring in a household that had no juice on hand.