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Sago and Apple Pudding
Mrs. Arthurs.
Boil a cup of sago in boiling water with a little cinnamon, a cup of sugar, lemon flavouring; cut apples in thin slices, mix them with the sago; after it is well boiled add a small piece of butter; pour into pudding dish and bake half an hour, •
A Victorian nursery-style pudding that depends almost entirely on getting the sago properly swollen before the apples go in. The original assumes you know the ratios and the oven, so both need filling in.
- Sago, and what to use insteadPearl sago is starch extracted from the pith of tropical sago palms, sold in small hard pellets. Pearl tapioca of the same size behaves nearly identically and is far easier to find; use it cup for cup.
- Liquid ratioThe recipe gives no water quantity. A cup of small pearl sago needs roughly four cups of water to hydrate fully; it should be simmered until the pellets are translucent with no chalky white centre, about 20 to 30 minutes, stirring so it does not catch.
- The hinge: cook the starch firstAny opaque core left in a pearl will stay gritty through baking, because the pudding never gets wet enough in the oven to finish the job. "After it is well boiled" is the instruction that matters most.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Bake at 350F for the half hour indicated; the pudding is only setting and softening the apple, not browning.
- ApplesSlice thin, no more than an eighth of an inch, or they will still be firm when the half hour is up. A tart cooking apple such as Bramley or Granny Smith balances the full cup of sugar.
- Lemon flavouringIn period kitchens this would have been lemon essence or a few drops of oil of lemon, both considerably stronger than modern extract. The zest of one lemon gives a cleaner result.
- Butter"A small piece" is about a tablespoon, stirred in off the heat before the mixture goes into the dish.
- Yield and servingFills a large pudding dish and serves about six. Best warm rather than hot, with cream or a thin custard; it firms up as it cools.
Sago reached British and North American kitchens as a colonial import, shipped as washed pearls from Southeast Asia, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it was a staple of cheap, filling, easily digested cookery. Cookbooks of the period routinely grouped it with tapioca, arrowroot and semolina under the heading of invalid and nursery food, on the reasoning that a bland starch was gentle on a weak stomach. Combining it with apples and a good deal of sugar, as Mrs. Arthurs does here, is the domestic move that turns a sickroom gruel into a family dessert. Recipes credited by name to contributors, as this one is, were the backbone of community compilations like The Home Cook Book, which was assembled from the receipts of Toronto householders and sold in aid of the city's Hospital for Sick Children.