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Sago Custard
C. D. Adams.
Three tablespoons sago boiled in a little water till clear; add one quart of milk, let it come to a boil, then add five or six well beaten eggs and sugar to taste. Put the vessel containing the custard in a kettle of boiling water; stir it briskly till it thickens a little; flavour with vanilla after it is partly cool.
A plain stirred custard thickened with both sago and egg, of the kind Victorian households made for invalids and children. The whole thing hinges on heat control after the eggs go in.
- Sago itselfSago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls. Modern pearl tapioca of similar size behaves similarly and is far easier to find; three tablespoons of pearls is roughly 35 g.
- Boiling it clearCover the pearls with about a cup of water and simmer until each pearl is translucent all the way through with no white centre, 10 to 15 minutes depending on size. Soaking them for half an hour first shortens this and gives more even results. Undercooked pearls stay chalky and gritty in the finished custard.
- Temper the eggsThe recipe adds five or six beaten eggs straight to boiling milk, which will scramble them. Whisk a ladleful of the hot milk into the eggs first, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat.
- Do not let it boil againThis is the point that matters. Once the eggs are in, the custard is finished over water, not direct heat, and it must not exceed about 180F/82C or it curdles. "Stir briskly till it thickens a little" means until it coats a spoon, which happens well before anything looks like pudding.
- The vessel in boiling waterThis is a improvised double boiler. Use a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering, not vigorously boiling, water, with the bowl clear of the water itself.
- Sugar"To taste" for a quart of milk and six eggs would conventionally be about 1/3 to 1/2 cup, added with the eggs so it dissolves. A pinch of salt sharpens the flavour.
- Vanilla after coolingSound advice and worth keeping: vanilla extract is alcohol-based and loses aroma in a hot custard. Stir it in when the mixture is warm rather than hot, along with a grating of nutmeg if you like.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half; six to eight servings in cups or glasses. Chill covered, with the surface pressed with plastic wrap if you dislike a skin, and eat within two days.
Sago reached British and American kitchens through the East Indies trade, and by the mid-nineteenth century it sat on the grocer's shelf beside arrowroot, tapioca and ground rice as one of the standard "invalid starches" — bland, easily digested, and cheap enough to stretch expensive milk and eggs. Recipes like this one turn up constantly in community cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, contributed by name, as here, by a local subscriber, in the sick-room and nursery chapters of such books. Sago later faded from Western cooking, while tapioca, which is prepared from cassava rather than palm pith, remained familiar as the more common of the two pearls.