Home › Soups › Veal and Sago Soup
Veal and Sago Soup
3 quarts cold water ¼ lb. pearl sago 2 cups scalded milk Yolks 4 eggs Salt and pepper Order meat from market, very finely chopped.
A veal broth thickened with sago and finished with an egg-and-milk liaison — a white soup of the sort that filled the invalid-cookery and light-supper chapters of turn-of-the-century American books. The surviving text is an ingredient list, so the notes below deal with the materials and the two steps that decide whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonBeaten yolks stirred into hot soup will curdle unless they are tempered first — whisk a ladle or two of the hot liquid into the yolks, return the mixture to the pan, and keep it below a simmer from then on. Once the yolks are in, the soup must never boil.
- Pearl sagoSago is starch from the pith of tropical sago palms, sold as small hard pearls that swell and turn translucent. It is not tapioca, though tapioca pearls of the same size behave similarly and are far easier to buy. A quarter pound is somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup dry, depending on the pearl, and thickens three quarts noticeably.
- Soaking and cooking the sagoOlder pearl sago benefits from soaking in cold water for half an hour; it then cooks in the broth in 15 to 20 minutes. Add it to broth that is already strained, since it will cloud and cling to any solids left in the pot.
- "Scalded milk"Milk heated just to the point where bubbles form at the edge of the pan, about 180F. With modern pasteurised milk the step is no longer about killing organisms; it simply brings the milk up to temperature so it does not chill the soup or shock the yolks.
- Very finely chopped vealThe recipe names no quantity, only that the market do the chopping; a fine chop would have helped draw flavour and gelatin from a small amount of meat in a short simmer, though the book does not say so. Ground veal, or veal shoulder cut small, does the same; a veal knuckle or a piece of shin added alongside gives the broth body.
- Three quarts of cold waterStart cold and bring the meat up slowly — that is what draws out albumen as scum you can skim, rather than clouding the broth. Expect to reduce to somewhere near two quarts before the milk goes in.
- YieldWith three quarts of water and two cups of milk, this makes eight to ten servings as a first course. It does not reheat well once the yolks are in; warm gently and only once.
Sago reached American and British kitchens as a colonial import from the Malay Archipelago and was valued less for flavour — it has almost none — than for being a bland, easily digested starch. That made it a fixture of nineteenth-century sickroom cookery, where sago puddings and sago soups were fed to convalescents, and veal broth was recommended in the same breath for the same reason: pale, mild, and thought to be gentle on the stomach. Combining the two with a milk-and-yolk finish produces the class of dish older books call a white soup, closely related to the French potages liés thickened with egg yolks. Such recipes sit at the point where invalid dishes were still expected in a general household manual, alongside the plainer everyday soups, and where sago was giving way to the cheaper and more widely stocked tapioca.