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Tomatoes with Sago
Boil one pint of tomatoes and three pints of consomme in a saucepan for ten minutes, seasoning with one-half pinch each of salt and pepper; add two tablespoonfuls of sago, cook again for fifteen minutes, stirring gently, and serve.
A clear tomato soup thickened with sago pearls, in the terse house style of Oscar Tschirky's kitchen. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the ingredients no longer mean what they did.
- Sago, and what to use insteadSago is starch pressed from the pith of the sago palm and sold as small hard pearls. It is stocked in South and Southeast Asian groceries; small pearl tapioca behaves close enough to stand in. Avoid the large "boba" pearls, which will still be chalky at the centre after fifteen minutes.
- The hinge: stir gently, and keep the heat lowSago sticks to the bottom and clouds the soup if it catches, and vigorous stirring breaks the pearls into paste. A bare simmer with an occasional pass of the spoon is what "stirring gently" is protecting.
- A pint of tomatoesThe recipe does not say whether these are fresh or canned. Canned tomatoes with their juice were widely available by 1896 and are the easiest reading; one 14- to 15-ounce can gets you close, though it is a little short of a full pint by volume. Fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped, work but will be thinner and sweeter.
- ConsommeA clarified beef or veal stock. Good low-sodium beef stock is the practical substitute; if you use commercial broth, hold back on the added salt until the end, since the soup reduces as it cooks.
- "One-half pinch"The book never defines its pinch, so the quantity is left to the cook. Read it as a scant quarter teaspoon of salt and a few grinds of pepper for the two quarts of liquid here, then correct at the end.
- It thickens on standingSago keeps absorbing liquid off the heat, and leftovers set to a near-jelly. Serve it straight from the pan, and thin reheated soup with a little stock.
- YieldTwo quarts of liquid, so six to eight cups as a first course.
Sago reached European and American kitchens as a colonial import from the Malay Archipelago, where the starch is washed from the felled trunk of Metroxylon sagu, and by the nineteenth century it sat on grocers' shelves beside tapioca and arrowroot as one of the cheap, bland, easily digested starches. Much of its reputation came from invalid cookery — sago pudding and sago gruel were standard sickroom food — but hotel kitchens also valued the pearls for what they did to a clear soup, giving body and a little visual interest without the flour taste of a roux. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, published his compendium in 1896, and its soup chapter is full of these small variations on a stock-and-garnish formula: the same consomme appears again and again with rice, barley, vermicelli or tapioca. Sago has largely dropped out of Western cooking since, displaced by tapioca in exactly the dishes it once held, though it remains a staple starch across island Southeast Asia.