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Dessert

Sago, with Fruit Juice

A sweetened sago dessert mixed with fruit juice, set in a mold, served with sugar and milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and milk work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 738 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Sago, with Fruit Juice

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sago

  1. Soak the sago in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. In a saucepan, stir the soaked sago until it boils.

  3. Reduce heat and simmer gently, stirring frequently until clear and thick.

  4. Add the fruit juice and boil together for a few minutes.

  5. Sweeten with sugar to taste.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a damp mold and refrigerate until set, preferably overnight.

  2. To serve, turn out onto a glass dish, sift white sugar over it, and pour milk or cream around it.

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. Tea + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Tea + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,204 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Large sago
Starch that swells and gelatinises as it simmers, giving the dish its clear, thick body and firm set.
Fruit juice
Adds flavour, colour and liquid, and its acidity is balanced by the sugar added afterwards.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to taste and contributes to the flavour of the finished set dish.

The step that matters

Simmering the sago until clear. Sago must be stirred and simmered gently until the grains turn translucent. Stopping too early leaves a cloudy, chalky centre, while boiling too hard or not stirring can scorch the bottom and make the mixture lumpy.

“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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