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Sago and Chicken Soup
From the carcass of a cold chicken a thin stock can be made; this flavored with a slice of onion, and the green ends of a bunch of celery, is finished by cooking in it one heaping teaspoonful of sago to each quart, until the sago is perfectly transparent.
A frugal invalid-and-supper soup built on the bones of a roast chicken. The whole thing hinges on cooking the sago long enough to lose its opacity — the pearls should look like glass, not chalk.
- Sago itselfSago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls. It is still available in Asian and South Asian groceries; small pearl tapioca is the standard substitute and behaves almost identically. Do not use the large "boba" pearls, which are far too big for a thin soup.
- How long the pearls takeA heaping teaspoon per quart needs roughly 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer to go fully translucent, with a white speck at the centre being the sign it is not done. Stir now and then, since the pearls sink and stick.
- "Thin stock"The recipe assumes a picked-over carcass covered with water and simmered, but gives no method or timing. Expect something light-bodied, so season assertively with salt at the end — sago thickens slightly but adds no flavour of its own.
- The aromatics"the green ends of a bunch of celery" is most likely the leafy top, used here for flavour rather than discarded. A slice of onion means one round, not a whole chopped onion; this is meant to be delicate.
- Strain before adding sagoTake out the bones, onion and celery tops and strain the stock clear, then return it to the pan and add the sago. Pearls cooked among the debris are impossible to separate out later.
- Serving and holdingA quart serves three or four as a first course. It thickens noticeably as it stands and the pearls go gluey overnight, so make it close to the time it is wanted.
Sago reached British and American kitchens as a colonial import from the Malay Archipelago, where the palm's pith has long been a staple starch, and by the nineteenth century it sat on the grocer's shelf beside tapioca and arrowroot as one of the standard "light" starches. Cookbooks of this period assigned it largely to the sickroom and the nursery — sago puddings, sago gruel, thin sago broths — on the reasoning that a bland, easily swallowed starch was suitable for weak digestions. Its appearance here, in a soup made from a carcass already stripped of its meat, shows the other half of this soup chapter: nothing edible left the kitchen unused, and a teaspoon of cheap starch turned a weak second-day stock into something that could be sent to the table.