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Consomme, Sago
Prepare a consomme strain into a saucepan and let boil. Thoroughly wash in fresh water four ounces sago, drain on a sieve and sprinkle into the consomme, boil for fifteen minutes, mixing once in a while, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A garnished consommé of the plainest kind: clear broth, thickened only slightly by grains of sago swelled in it. The whole thing depends on the consommé being genuinely clear and well seasoned, since nothing else in the bowl carries flavour.
- Quantity of liquidThe original names no quantity of consomme, assuming a batch made elsewhere in the book. Four ounces (roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup) of pearl sago suits something on the order of two quarts; in much less liquid it turns to porridge.
- Sago itselfPearl sago is starch extracted from the pith of the sago palm, sold in small hard beads. It is stocked by South and Southeast Asian grocers and by some health-food shops. Small pearl tapioca is the closest substitute and behaves almost identically, though it goes slightly more gluey.
- Why wash itRinsing in fresh water and draining removes loose surface starch, which is what would otherwise cloud the consommé. Clouding is the one failure this dish cannot recover from, so rinse until the water runs clear and drain well.
- Sprinkle, do not dumpScatter the drained grains over the surface of boiling broth a handful at a time while stirring. Tipped in at once they clump and the centres stay chalky.
- The fifteen minutesFifteen minutes at a bare boil is about right for small pearl sago; larger pearls can need twenty to twenty-five. They are done when each bead is translucent with no white speck at the core.
- Holding and servingSago keeps swelling and absorbing as it sits, so serve within a few minutes of finishing. If it must wait, hold the consommé and the cooked sago separately and combine in the tureen.
- YieldWith no volume given, the servings depend on the batch of consomme; on the order of six to eight as a first course, in cups rather than deep bowls.
Sago reached European kitchens through the Dutch and British trade in the Malay Archipelago, where the palm's starchy pith has been a staple food far longer than it has been a soup garnish in the West. By the nineteenth century it had settled into two roles in English and American cookery: milk puddings for the nursery, and clear soups for the dining room, where its small translucent beads gave a consommé visible body without muddying it. Filippini's book, written out of the Delmonico's tradition, lists such garnished consommés in long runs — sago, tapioca, vermicelli, royale, julienne — a pattern that suggests, though the printed page alone cannot confirm it, that a professional kitchen made one large batch of clear stock and distinguished the soups on the menu by what was dropped into it. The recipe is short for the same reason: the work was all in the consommé, which the reader was expected to have made already.