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Cocoanut Bread Pudding
Boil one quart of milk submerged in a boiler.
When hot, add a teacupful of grated cocoanut, and boil two hours. Add a cup of bread-crumbs, two eggs well beaten, and half a cup of sugar. Currants or raisins may be added. Boil one hour, and eat cold.
XX. Custards and Creams.
A milk-and-coconut pudding thickened with bread and egg, cooked entirely on the stovetop rather than baked. The three hours of total cooking are not a misprint, but most of that time is doing one job: extracting flavour from the coconut.
- "Boiled... submerged in a boiler"This means a double boiler, not a pan set directly over the flame. Held in water, the milk never reaches a true boil; it sits at a bare simmer. Set over direct heat, a quart of milk held two hours will scorch and skin.
- A teacupfulIn American books of this period a teacup is reckoned at anywhere from about a half cup to three-quarters of a cup, smaller than the standard measuring cup, and usage was not consistent. For grated coconut the difference is not critical.
- The coconutFresh coconut, cracked and grated at home, is most likely what is meant. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is both sweeter and drier; if you use it, cut the half cup of sugar back. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is the nearest substitute, though being drier and finer it is not an exact swap by volume.
- Why two hoursThe long infusion in the double boiler softens the coconut fibre and draws its fat and flavour into the milk. Some evaporation will occur, though a double boiler reduces far less than direct heat; top up with milk if it thickens past a pourable custard before the eggs go in.
- Adding the eggsBeat the eggs with a ladleful of the hot milk before stirring them into the pot, or they will curdle into threads. The mixture should stay well below a true boil for the final hour or it will separate.
- Bread-crumbsSoft crumbs torn from a day-old loaf, not dry commercial crumbs, which will drink up far more liquid and give a stodgy result.
- The final hourAn hour in the double boiler sets the custard firmly and is safely past the temperature at which egg coagulates. A modern cook can judge by feel instead: it is done when a spoon drawn through leaves a clean track.
- Yield and servingAbout six servings. The pudding thickens considerably as it chills, so the instruction to eat it cold suits it; several hours or overnight in the refrigerator does no harm.
- Stray text"XX. Custards and Creams" at the end appears to be a chapter or section heading caught by the typesetting, not part of the method.
Coconut is often said to have arrived in nineteenth-century American kitchens as an imported luxury sold whole and grated at home, though it was fairly common in American port cities by mid-century; the labor of grating shows in the way old recipes stretch a single cupful through a whole quart of milk. By the closing decades of the century desiccated and sweetened prepared coconut was widely sold in tins and boxes, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are full of coconut cakes, pies and puddings that would have been rarities a generation earlier. The dish itself belongs to the older family of bread puddings, the standing household answer to stale loaves, though here it is cooked on the stovetop in a double boiler rather than in the oven.