Home › Desserts › Grape Sago Pudding
Grape Sago Pudding
Soak 1 cupful of sago over night in plenty of cold water; in the morning pour off the water; put the sago in a double boiler with 1 cupful of boiling water, ½ of a cupful of sugar, 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, and 1 cupful of juice pressed from grapes which have been stemmed and cooked for ten minutes. Cook until the sago is clear, adding more grape juice if it becomes too stiff, then add 1 cupful of seeded grapes, cook ten minutes more and turn into a baking dish. Brown in a quick oven and serve with a creamy sauce.
A simple starch pudding that depends on two things: sago cooked until every grain is translucent, and grapes with enough acid and colour to carry the dish. Below are the points that need translating.
- Cook until clear, not until thickThe hinge is the word clear. Sago that still shows a white opaque core at the centre of the pearl will be chalky and gritty no matter how thick the surrounding liquid looks. Expect 30-45 minutes in the double boiler, and judge by crushing a pearl against the side of the pan rather than by the clock.
- Sago itselfPearl sago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold in small hard beads. It is not interchangeable with quick-cooking tapioca, which is pre-gelatinised and would turn to paste here; small pearl tapioca is the closest substitute and behaves much the same, though it generally needs less soaking.
- The overnight soakThe soak softens the pearls so they hydrate evenly; a modern pearl sago will still benefit, but two to three hours in cold water is usually enough. Pour off the cloudy soaking water as directed, or the pudding goes gluey.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. The pudding is already cooked when it goes in, so this is a short colouring pass of 10-15 minutes, just to set a skin on top. Longer and the surface goes leathery.
- The grapesThis assumes slip-skin grapes of the Concord type, which were the ordinary American table and juice grape when the book was written. Cooking them ten minutes and pressing yields a strongly coloured, tart juice. Seedless supermarket grapes make a far blander pudding; unsweetened bottled Concord juice is a better stand-in for the juice, with fresh grapes stirred in whole.
- Seeded grapes"Seeded" here means the seeds have been removed, not that the grapes contain seeds. With Concords, halve them and flick the seeds out, or squeeze the pulp free of the skins and sieve it.
- Creamy sauceIn books of this period the phrase usually covers a thin pouring custard, or simply cream thinned with milk and sweetened. Plain cold heavy cream also works.
- YieldAbout four to six servings. It sets firmer as it cools, and is best warm or at room temperature rather than chilled hard.
Sago belongs to the family of cheap starch puddings -- sago, tapioca, cornstarch, rice -- that carried the dessert course in economical households. Imported in bulk from Southeast Asia, it was one of the least expensive things a cook could turn into a filling sweet, and cookery books of the era print dozens of variations distinguished only by the flavouring: lemon, apple, prune, or, as here, grape. The grape version reflects the American autumn glut of Concord-type grapes, a variety selected in the mid-nineteenth century and grown widely in home gardens and along fences. The instruction to brown the finished pudding in a quick oven is a small piece of thrift-era presentation, turning what is essentially a boiled starch into something that arrives at the table looking baked.