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Sago Pudding
1 ounce of sago 1 pint of milk 1/2 ounce butter 1 dessertspoon of sugar Thin rind of 1/2 lemon A little grated nutmeg Wash the sago, and put it in a pie dish, with as much boiling water as will just cover it; let it stand for an hour. Meantime put the milk in a saucepan with the lemon rind, and let it simmer until it is nicely flavored. Pour away any water that the sago has not absorbed, and add the milk, which must have been strained and sweetened and the butter melted in it. Grate over it a little nutmeg, and bake it in a moderate oven for about an hour.
A plain nursery milk pudding that depends on one thing: the sago must be fully hydrated and swollen before it goes into the oven, or you get gritty beads suspended in scorched milk.
- The soak is the recipeThe hour in boiling water is not optional prep, it is most of the cooking. Sago that goes in dry stays hard in the centre no matter how long the pudding bakes, and drinks the milk into a stiff paste.
- Sago, and what to use insteadSago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls in Asian and South Asian groceries. Small pearl tapioca behaves almost identically and is the usual substitute; instant or minute tapioca does not, as it needs no soak and will dissolve.
- Quantities1 ounce of sago is roughly 2 level tablespoons; 1/2 ounce butter is about a tablespoon. A dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, near 2 teaspoons.
- The pintThe book's origin decides this. A British pint is 20 fl oz, an American pint 16. At this ratio either works, but the 16 oz version gives a firmer, more set pudding and the 20 oz a loose, spoonable one.
- Moderate oven350F. If the top browns before the middle sets, drop to 325F and cover loosely with foil for the last 20 minutes.
- Lemon rindPare it with a peeler so no white pith comes along, or the milk turns bitter as it simmers. Straining before it meets the sago, as directed, matters because the rind will not soften in the pudding.
- Stir onceThe soaked pearls sink. Around 20 minutes in, when the surface has just begun to set, stir the pudding through once to redistribute them, then leave it alone to form its skin.
- YieldA pint of milk makes three to four small servings. Serve hot, straight from the dish, with stewed fruit or jam if the sugar seems thin by modern standards.
Sago reached British and American kitchens as a colonial import from the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea, where the palm's pith is still a staple starch, and by the nineteenth century it had settled into the domestic repertoire as invalid and nursery food, valued for being bland, cheap and easy to digest. Milk puddings of this kind — sago, tapioca, ground rice, semolina — were common in the sweet course of modest households. The flavouring here is characteristic of the era's economy: a strip of lemon peel simmered in the milk and a grating of nutmeg, doing the work that vanilla and cream would do later.