Home › Desserts › Strawberry Sago
Strawberry Sago
Soak one cup of Larkin Sago in three cups of cold water for two hours, and cook in a double boiler until transparent. When cool, pour over strawberries in a mold and serve perfectly cold with sugar and cream. Raspberries, blackberries and pineapple may be used in place of the strawberries.
A simple cold-set pudding that depends entirely on cooking the sago until every grain has gone clear. The recipe assumes you know what sago is and gives no sweetening for the starch itself, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- Sago, and what to use insteadSago is starch extracted from the pith of tropical palms, sold as small hard pearls. Pearl tapioca of the same size behaves almost identically and is far easier to find; small "seed" tapioca will work, but instant or minute tapioca will not, as it dissolves rather than staying in distinct beads.
- "Larkin" is a brand, not a varietyThe Larkin Company of Buffalo sold groceries and household goods by mail, often as premiums, and its cookbooks named its own products throughout. Read it as plain pearl sago.
- Do not skip the soakTwo hours in cold water hydrates the pearls right through. Sago dropped straight into hot liquid tends to set a gelled skin on the outside and stay chalky at the centre, and is slow to come right afterwards.
- Double boiler, and whySago sticks and scorches over direct heat, and hard stirring breaks the pearls down. Over simmering water expect a long, slow cook; the recipe gives no time, and the finish line is visual -- every pearl translucent with no white speck in the middle.
- SweeteningThe sago itself is unsweetened here; all the sugar arrives at the table. If you would rather not serve it that way, stir two to three tablespoons of sugar and a pinch of salt into the hot sago, along with a little vanilla or lemon zest.
- Setting the moldPour the sago while it is still pourable but no longer hot, or it will cook the berries and leach their colour. Give it several hours in the refrigerator; overnight is better. The recipe does not say to turn it out, and a sago set is soft -- if you try, dip the mold briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- The fruitStrawberries, raspberries and blackberries go in raw. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will not wreck a starch set the way it does gelatine, though its juice and acidity can thin the pudding; canned or briefly cooked pineapple is the safer choice.
- YieldOne cup of dry sago takes up all three cups of water, so reckon on roughly a quart of set pudding before the fruit is counted.
Sago reached Western kitchens through the colonial trade in Southeast Asian palm starch, and by the nineteenth century it was a staple of the nursery and the sickroom: cheap, bland, easily digested, and endlessly recommended for invalids and children. Cold molded sago set over summer fruit is one of the dressed-up forms it took -- the same trick that produced the fruit-and-tapioca puddings still made today. Its appearance here under a brand name is characteristic of the period's promotional cookery books, which were given away or sold cheaply by grocers and mail-order houses to move their own packaged goods; the recipes are genuine, but the shopping list is not neutral.