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Rod Gruid
(Norway and Sweden.) Mash and strain 3 boxes of currants, add water to make 2 quarts of juice, 1 pound sugar, 1 stick of cinnamon, rind of 1 lemon. Boil it, skim it, add 1/2 pound sago; when melted and clear, pour into moulds. Set on ice, eat with cream.
A red fruit pudding set with sago rather than gelatine. The whole thing turns on the sago: it must cook slowly in the hot juice until every pearl is clear, or the mould will be gritty at the centre.
- "3 boxes of currants"Berries of the period were sold in shallow market baskets of a pint or a quart depending on the trade, so the weight is uncertain; reckon on somewhere between about 1 1/2 and 3 lb of fruit and adjust water to reach the 2 quarts of juice the recipe asks for. Red currants are meant here, not dried Zante currants. Frozen red currants work; raspberries, or a mix of red currants and raspberries, is a common Scandinavian pairing.
- Getting 2 quarts of juiceCrush the fruit, warm it gently to release the juice, then strain through a jelly bag or fine sieve. Do not press hard if you want a clear pudding. Top up with water to reach the full 2 quarts before adding sugar.
- Sago, and how muchHalf a pound is about 1 1/4 cups of small pearl sago. Rinse it first and add it in a slow stream to simmering juice while stirring, or it will clump on the bottom. Pearl tapioca of the same size behaves nearly identically if sago is hard to find.
- "When melted and clear"This is the hinge. Keep the juice at a bare simmer, stirring often, for 20 to 30 minutes until no white core remains in any pearl. Boiling hard scorches the starch at the base of the pan and clouds the pudding; undercooking leaves chalky specks that never soften on chilling.
- SkimmingCurrant juice throws a pink foam as it comes to the boil. Skim it before the sago goes in, since once the pudding thickens the scum cannot be lifted cleanly.
- Moulds and settingRinse the moulds with cold water and do not dry them; the pudding will turn out more easily. "Set on ice" means several hours in the refrigerator, four at least, overnight for a firm unmoulding. Sago sets stiffer as it cools than it appears in the pan.
- Lemon rind and cinnamonPare the rind in wide strips with no pith, and lift both it and the cinnamon stick out before the mixture goes into the moulds.
- Yield and servingTwo quarts of juice plus sago makes roughly 10 to 12 servings. The recipe says only "eat with cream"; in the Scandinavian original this is plain pouring cream rather than whipped, and the pudding is sweet enough not to need the cream sweetened.
The name is a mangling of rødgrød — Danish for "red porridge," and rødgrøt or rødgraut in Norwegian — the summer fruit pudding known across Scandinavia and northern Germany, where it goes by rote Grütze. Grød simply means porridge or gruel, and the dish began as one: red currant or raspberry juice thickened with a grain, first semolina or rye, later sago, potato starch or cornflour as those became cheap. In Denmark it is eaten as rødgrød med fløde, a phrase long used as a half-joking test of whether a foreigner can manage the language. Its appearance here, filed under a compressed Anglicised spelling and labelled simply "Norway and Sweden," is characteristic of turn-of-the-century American collections of foreign cookery.