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Cocoanut Cream
Grate a fresh cocoanut and mix with it an ounce of sugar; melt in as little water as possible three-fourths ounce of gelatine, whip the whites of three eggs, mix with them one-half a pint of milk, stir over the fire until the custard thickens. Sweeten with six tablespoonfuls of sugar, stir the gelatine and a full half pint of grated cocoanut, with the cocoanut milk, into the custard; whip half a pint of cream (solid) and stir it very carefully into the custard. When the batter is quite cold (but before it sets) flavor with vanilla or lemon. Mould and place on the ice.
A gelatine-set coconut cream, essentially a Bavarian cream made with egg whites rather than yolks. The order of operations is what makes or breaks it.
- The hingeStir the dissolved gelatine into the custard while it is still warm, then let the mixture cool to barely tepid before folding in the whipped cream. Add the cream too early and it deflates; wait until the gelatine has begun to set and you get lumps you cannot smooth out.
- Half a pint, an ounceA half pint is one cup. An ounce of sugar is about 2 tablespoons, so the total sweetening here is roughly 1/2 cup plus a little.
- GelatineThree-quarters of an ounce is three modern 1/4 oz envelopes, which will set this quantity very firmly indeed — turn-out-of-the-mould firm, as intended for a Victorian table. Two envelopes give a softer, more modern cream. Sprinkle over 3 to 4 tablespoons cold water, let it swell five minutes, then warm to dissolve; do not boil it.
- Cocoanut milkThis means the thin water drained from inside the fresh nut, not canned coconut milk. One coconut yields roughly 1/2 to 1 cup of it and about 3 to 4 cups of grated meat, so a single nut covers the recipe with meat left over.
- The custardEgg whites set at a lower temperature than yolks and curdle without warning. Cook over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly, and pull it the moment it coats the spoon — it will not thicken to a yolk custard's body and should not be pushed that far.
- "Cream (solid)"Heavy or whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks. Nineteenth-century cream was unhomogenised and thick from the pan; modern heavy cream whipped just short of stiff behaves the same way in the fold.
- "Place on the ice"Refrigerate. Allow at least four hours, and overnight for a mould you intend to unmould. Rinse the mould with cold water first, or wipe it with a neutral oil, and dip it briefly in warm water to release.
- YieldAbout five cups of finished cream — six to eight servings in a single mould, or eight small individual ones.
Coconut moved from luxury to commonplace in American kitchens in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as steam shipping from the Caribbean made whole nuts cheap in northern cities and commercial shredded coconut appeared in grocers' stock. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s responded with a run of coconut cakes, pies, custards and creams, and this one belongs to the "fancy dishes" tradition of gelatine moulds — a category that expanded once granulated gelatine came on the market, replacing the labour of boiling down calves' feet or working with isinglass. The technique is the standard Bavarian cream of the period, custard plus gelatine plus whipped cream, with the unusual economy of using only egg whites.