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Sago Pudding with Currants
Boil a pint milk in a small saucepan, sprinkle evenly three ounces sago and continually mix while cooking for eight minutes. Remove from the fire, add three ounces powdered sugar, two ounces picked currants, a teaspoon vanilla essence and three egg yolks. Sharply mix for three minutes. Beat up the whites of the three eggs to a stiff froth and gently mix with the other preparation for half minute.
Butter and sugar six pudding moulds, fill up with the preparation, lay in a tin, pour in hot water up to half the height of the moulds and set in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove and unmould upon a hot dish, pour a Sabayon sauce over them and serve.
A steamed-baked custard pudding thickened with sago rather than flour or breadcrumbs, baked in a water bath and turned out. The recipe assumes you know what sago does and gives no oven temperature.
- Oven and water bathNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a custard set in a bain-marie, but that figure is a modern suggestion, not the book's. The water should be hot when it goes in and is best kept below a boil, or the puddings may puff and then sink.
- SagoSago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls. It is not the same as tapioca pearls, though tapioca of the same size behaves closely enough to substitute. Three ounces is a scant half cup.
- The mixture will be very thickThree ounces of sago to a pint of milk gives a very thick mixture, and it will thicken further off the heat; eight minutes may not fully soften the pearls. Stir constantly over low heat, since sago catches on the bottom easily. If it goes past spoonable, loosen it with a few tablespoons of warm milk before the yolks go in.
- Cool before the yolks"Remove from the fire" then add yolks needs a pause. Let the sago drop below scalding or the yolks will scramble in threads; a minute or two of stirring is enough.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Picked" means gone over for stems and grit, which older dried fruit carried plenty of. Two ounces is about a third of a cup.
- Powdered sugarIn a book of this date this generally means finely ground sugar, closer to modern caster or superfine than to the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar on shelves now. Superfine granulated is the better match.
- MouldsSix pudding moulds means individual dariole moulds or timbales of roughly 4 to 6 ounces. Buttering and then dusting with sugar gives the caramelised skin that lets them slip out; do both, and let them stand a minute before turning out.
- Sabayon sauceNot included here. It is yolks, sugar and a fortified wine such as marsala or sherry whisked over hot water until thick and foamy, and it must be made just before serving since it separates as it stands.
- YieldSix small puddings, one to a person.
Sago reached European kitchens as a colonial import from the Malay archipelago and was treated for most of the nineteenth century as an invalid food, boiled thin with milk and sugar for the sick and the very young. Cookbooks of the early twentieth century, this one included, sometimes gave it a place higher up the menu, and the treatment here follows that pattern: enrich the nursery gruel with yolks, fold in a beaten-white foam, bake it in individual moulds, turn it out and hide it under a sabayon. The result belongs to the large family of continental hotel entremets that a good household cook might be expected to attempt, and the pairing of a cheap starch with an expensive wine sauce is the whole logic of that kind of cooking. Sago has since largely given way to tapioca in English-language kitchens, though it remains a staple starch across Southeast Asia and parts of India.