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over and remove particles of fat. Cover meat with water, bring slowly to boiling-point, and simmer two hours, skimming occasionally; strain and reheat. Soak sago one-half hour in enough cold water to cover, stir into hot stock, boil thirty minutes, and add milk; then pour mixture slowly on yolks of eggs, slightly beaten. Season with salt and pepper.
The page begins mid-sentence, so the ingredient list and quantities are on the preceding page; what survives here is the method for a sago soup thickened with egg yolks. Read it as technique rather than a complete formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe verbatim text gives no amounts for meat, sago, milk or eggs. Working from comparable soups of the period, expect roughly 3 lb of meat and bone to 3 quarts water, 2 to 3 tablespoons sago, a cup of milk and 2 yolks, but these are inferences, not what the book says.
- SagoPearl sago is starch from the pith of tropical palms, sold in small hard beads. It is not the same as tapioca or the large "sago" pearls in bubble tea, though small pearl tapioca behaves similarly. Look in South and Southeast Asian groceries.
- The soak mattersHalf an hour in cold water hydrates the beads so they swell evenly in the stock instead of clumping and setting the outsides while the centres stay chalky.
- Thirty minutes is not a mistakeSago needs the full time to go from opaque white to clear and slippery. Undercooked beads taste of raw starch. Stir now and then; starch settles and scorches on the bottom of the pan.
- The hinge: the yolksPour the hot mixture slowly onto the beaten yolks off the heat, whisking, and do not return the soup to a boil afterwards. Boiling curdles the yolks and the soup goes grainy. Anything above roughly 180F risks it.
- Stock temperature"Simmer two hours" means barely trembling, not rolling. A hard boil emulsifies fat back into the liquid and clouds the stock you have just skimmed.
- YieldThe text gives no quantities, so any serving count is guesswork. Sago soups of this kind thicken further on standing; loosen with hot stock rather than water.
Sago soup belongs to the nineteenth-century category of invalid and convalescent cookery, where bland, easily digested starches were prescribed for the sick, the elderly and small children. Sago, imported as pearls from Southeast Asian palm pith, arrived in American and British kitchens alongside tapioca and arrowroot and was valued precisely because it was mild and thickened without flour. The addition of milk and egg yolks at the end — a liaison, in French kitchen vocabulary — enriches a plain meat broth into something closer to a cream soup.