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Dessert

Sago Pudding

A sweet pudding of sago pearls boiled in water, sweetened with sugar, baked, and served with sugar and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Sago Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash the sago thoroughly.

  2. Place the sago in a pudding dish.

Make the pudding

  1. Pour in the boiling water, stirring continuously.

  2. Add the salt and sugar.

  3. Let it sit for a while before baking.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 1 hour.

  2. Serve with sugar and butter stirred together.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sago
Swells in boiling water to form the soft, starchy body of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding taste balanced.
Butter
Adds richness and fat when stirred into the serving sugar.

The step that matters

Pour in the boiling water, stirring continuously. Sago starch must be stirred as the boiling water is added so the granules disperse evenly instead of clumping. Clumps stay hard inside and cook unevenly in the oven.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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