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Sago and Apple Pudding
Pare six apples and punch out the cores, fill holes with cinnamon and sugar, using two tea-spoons cinnamon to a cup of sugar; take one table-spoon sago to each apple, wash it thoroughly and let soak an hour in water enough to cover the apples, pour water and sago over the apples, and bake an hour and a half.
A plain baked apple pudding thickened by the starch that leaches out of soaking sago. The original gives no oven temperature and no dish size, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits this kind of pudding; at that heat an hour and a half should leave the sago translucent and the apples collapsing but still holding their shape.
- Sago itselfSago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls. It is not the same as tapioca (cassava), though small pearl tapioca behaves almost identically here and is far easier to find. Six tablespoons is the quantity for six apples.
- The soaking is the hingeThe hour of soaking is not optional. Dry sago pearls will not hydrate fully in a covered baking dish and you get gritty centres surrounded by thin liquid. Soak in the same water you will bake with, so none of the released starch is thrown away.
- How much water"Water enough to cover the apples" means enough to submerge them in the dish you intend to bake in. Judge it by the dish, not by a fixed measure.
- Punching out the coresAn apple corer, worked from the stem end without going all the way through, leaves a closed pocket that holds the cinnamon sugar instead of letting it wash into the water. Use a firm baking apple that will not go to sauce — Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Northern Spy.
- The filling quantityTwo teaspoons cinnamon to a cup of sugar makes more than six cored apples will hold; the surplus can be stirred into the water.
- CoveringBake covered for the first hour so the sago cooks in steam and liquid, then uncover for the last half hour to let the top set and colour lightly.
- Yield and servingSix servings, one apple each with its sago around it. Serve warm with cream or a thin custard; cold, the sago sets to a firm jelly.
Sago reached British and American kitchens through the East Indies trade and by the middle of the nineteenth century was a staple of the invalid tray and the nursery — cheap, bland, easily digested, and useful for thickening milk and fruit puddings without eggs or flour. Cookbooks of the period often treat sago, tapioca and arrowroot as broadly interchangeable in this role. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) carries a run of such puddings under one heading, and this one is about as economical as they come: six apples, a little sugar and spice, and a few spoonfuls of starch doing the work that cream and eggs would do in a richer house. Baked apples with a starch-thickened liquid around them belong to the same family as the tapioca-and-fruit puddings that stayed in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century.