Sago Pudding

Sago pudding is made from sago pearls cooked in milk or water with sugar, and it belongs to no single country. The source names none, and the honest answer is that versions of it exist across Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Britain, each quite different from the others. Sago itself is the starch extracted from the pith of the sago palm trunk, and most of the world's supply comes from Indonesia and Malaysia. The extracted starch is worked into a dough, forced through a sieve to form pearls and dried. In Malaysia the pudding is sago gula melaka, served with palm sugar syrup and coconut milk. In Papua New Guinea it is a staple preparation. In Britain it became a nursery pudding thickened with egg or cornflour, which is the version this recipe follows. It is often confused with tapioca, and the two are related but not identical. Tapioca pearls come from cassava root rather than palm pith, and while they can usually be substituted for one another they are not the same starch. Cassava has its own African history, carried by Portuguese ships from South America to West Africa, Asia and the West Indies, but that is a story about tapioca rather than about sago.