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Sago Pudding
847. Put three ounces of sago to soak in cold water for half an hour, then pour off the water, and stir the sago by degrees into a pint of milk boiling hot in a saucepan; let it boil ten minutes. Stir it till quite cool. Beat an egg well, mix it with a little cold milk, one ounce of sugar, and a little grated lemon-peel. Mix all well together, and bake in a slow oven an hour and a quarter. 848. Boiled Sago Pudding: one and a half ounce of sago to a little more than a pint of milk; boil it together with a stick of cinnamon: grate four sponge biscuits or the same quantity of bread crumbs, pour the sago and milk hot upon it, and let it stand covered till cool. Beat five eggs, leaving out half the whites. Beat all together with a little sugar and white wine, and put it in a buttered basin; a little less than an hour will boil it. Serve with wine sauce. This pudding may be baked, if preferred, in a dish lined with puff paste or not, according to fancy.
Two versions of the same pudding: a plain baked one and a richer boiled one thickened with sponge biscuit and enriched with wine. Both depend on cooking the sago through in milk before any egg goes near it.
- Sago itselfPearl sago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold in small hard pearls. Tapioca pearls of the same size behave almost identically if sago is hard to find; instant or quick-cook varieties will not, as they collapse into paste in the ten-minute boil.
- Weights to volumeThree ounces of sago is roughly half a cup of pearls; the ounce of sugar is about two tablespoons. A pint in a British book of this period is 20 fl oz, so use 2 1/2 US cups of milk, not 2.
- "Stir it till quite cool"This is the hinge of the first recipe. The egg is beaten into cooled sago, and if the mixture is still hot the egg scrambles and the pudding sets grainy. Stirring also stops a skin forming and keeps the pearls suspended rather than sunk.
- Slow ovenRoughly 275-300F. An hour and a quarter at that heat sets the custard gently; higher heat will make it weep. A water bath is not called for but does the same protective work.
- Boiling in a basinRecipe 848 is a basin pudding cooked in water: the buttered basin would have been covered with a cloth or paper and stood in a pan of simmering water. Keep the water topped up with boiling water so the level never drops.
- The eggsFive eggs with half the whites left out (five yolks and two or three whites) gives a soft, rich set.
- Wine and wine sauceThe white wine is a flavouring, a couple of tablespoons at most; sherry or madeira suits it better than a dry modern white. Wine sauces of the period were commonly butter, sugar and wine warmed together without boiling.
- YieldEither version fills a 1 1/2-pint dish or basin and serves four to six as a plain nursery-style pudding.
Sago reached British kitchens as a colonial import from island Southeast Asia, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it sat alongside tapioca, arrowroot and semolina in the standard rank of milk puddings that filled out family dinners and, more particularly, invalid trays. Starches of this kind were valued precisely for being bland and easily digested; sago pudding was prescribed for the convalescent as readily as it was served to children, which did its reputation lasting damage. The two treatments here show the range the same base could cover: one plainly baked with a single egg and lemon peel, the other lifted with cinnamon, sponge biscuit, five eggs and wine into something fit for the table proper, with a pastry lining offered as an optional further step up.