SAGO FOOD

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Discovering Sago – pearls of South East Asia





SAGO PRODUCT NICER AND MORE NATURAL
One of my favourite tropical desserts is Sago Gula Melaka (or simply sago in palm sugar). Served chilled, I enjoy the plain pearls of sago drenched in the delicious richness of coconut milk and sweet nutty flavours of gula melaka (palm sugar). It is particularly refreshing after a robust spicy meal, and is so Malayan in style and form.
I only noticed this dessert when my boyfriend now husband expressed a liking for this local pudding many years ago. I found the recipe in one of my much-treasured “Female” cookbooks, found the recipe simple enough, tried it, and the rest was history.
For a long time sago sat quietly in kitchen drawers only to be used for desserts. In Singapore, that really seems to be the only way it is eaten. Besides Sago Gula Melaka, it can also be found in the sweet Indian dessert of payasam, the Chinese “xi mi lu” a delicious chilled dessert of honey dew melon, sago and coconut milk, and the Nyonya/Malay snack of steamed sago cake.
I thought very little about sago other then enjoying them in these marvellous ways. That is until I started doing some research on South East Asian Food history. In various books, and travel accounts I read, sago kept popping up with increasing regularity. My interest piqued, I delved further into this innocuous pearl of starch, and found a little sago saga to be told.
So it is once upon a time, in a land far far away in the Malay Archipelago, sago was eaten regularly as a staple in this land, until it was displaced by rice. However it continued to be eaten many centuries ago in areas where rice was expensive or not available, such as Timor, the northern Moluccas, the Aru Islands, Buton and Selayar. It came to be seen as food for the poor. How sago was eaten and processed in Amboina, in the Moluccas in the 19th century was described by Anna Forbes, the wife of a naturalist,
“Sago as they used it would be unrecognisable to you. The first time I saw it was as we rowed up the bay of Amboina: the men were eating hard rust-coloured cakes, which seemed to me made of sawdust. And such they in a sense are. Unlike rice or barley, sago is not the fruit of a tiny stem, - it is the pith of the trunk of a great tree. The tree is felled, the pith – a soft fibrous wood – is scraped out, then it is beaten fine, and laid in a trough with water to steep. The water passes through a sieve into another trough, carrying with it the starch in the wood, and this settles at the bottom. The sediment of sago in its first stage – a fine powder, which is at once packed into cylinder-like cases for export. The neighbouring island of Ceram supplies most of the surrounding islands with their daily bread, and while we were at Paso boats frequently landed laden with this product.”
Sago continues to be extracted from the sago palm or other palms which develops a starchy pith. Not unlike Anna Forbes’ description, the pearl sago is known to be produced from the grinded pith. The processed starch from the pith is pressed through a sieve and dried on a hot surface, creating the white pellets of sago we are familiar with.
During the heydays of the East India trade, it was a product traded in the region, and was even considered a superior substance when it was first imported to Britain in the 18th century. It was added to soups and made into puddings and desserts, with its plainness relieved by the use of fruits. Yet its decline in popularity was steep, and it is now at best viewed as quixotic in the British kitchen. Its gluey texture and plain flavours can repel those unused to it.
However in colonial Singapore in the 19th and 20th century, it valiantly captured the palates of the British in the form of Sago Gula Melaka. Popular at home and at dinner parties, it was also the traditional dessert to famed curry tiffins and rijstaffel served in grand households and hotels in the Dutch East Indies and Malaya. The British continued to rave about it even during the post-war period. In the foreword of the 1947 Malayan cookbook, “Good Food” by Mr P C B Newington, A J H Dempster, the Assistant Food Controller of Perak wrote, “And here I would like to add a request that in the next edition Mr Newington includes recipes for the ever-popular mahmee and “Gula Malacca” in the preparation of which most Europeans are quite ignorant” The Gula Malacca here refers to Sago Gula Melaka.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that all these desserts used sago with a variety of milk, for it contrasts and complements so well with a rich liquid. This method of use is even documented in the far-reaches of Canton, China in the Tang Dynasty, when it is taken with water buffalo milk. Yet from this simple record on the use of sago in Tang China, I marvel at the trade links between South East Asia and China those many centuries ago.
Sago is a natural food that had been in existence for centuries. Its use had evolved with the passing of time. Although it is widely used in Singapore for desserts, the Thais invented a savoury twist to this unglamorous substance. It can be found as a bite-sized snack, saku sai moo, which has a cooked filling of pork, coriander, garlic, peanuts, fish sauce and palm sugar inside a sago covering.
Being such an “ancient” food in the region, I am certain of more innovative ways of using sago in neighbouring lands which we are not aware of in Singapore. It will be more than a culinary adventure to rediscover sago, for it is so intimately intertwined with the people of Southeast Asia.
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Keyword: sago food, natural food, diabetes food