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Cocoanut Cream Pie
Yolks of five eggs, three coffee cups cream, one dessert spoon corn starch, eight tablespoons granulated sugar, one and one-half tea-cups grated cocoanut, one teaspoon melted butter, two teacups milk, one dessert spoon vanilla, a little salt; line two small pie plates with a rich puff paste and fill with this mixture; when pies are baked beat the whites of five eggs very light, with three tablespoons powdered or granulated sugar, place it on the pies and put in the oven to brown.
A late-nineteenth-century baked coconut custard pie, written for cooks who measured in coffee cups and dessert spoons and who grated their coconut from the shell. The proportions need translating before you start, and the filling as written is very wet.
- The cupsA coffee cup is about 1 cup, a teacup about 3/4 cup. That gives roughly 3 cups cream, 1 1/2 cups milk and a generous 1 cup of coconut.
- Dessert spoonTwo teaspoons. So the thickening is 2 teaspoons cornstarch for over four cups of dairy, and the vanilla is 2 teaspoons.
- The liquid is the problemFour and a half cups of custard will not fit two small pie plates, and 5 yolks with 2 teaspoons cornstarch will barely set it. Either halve the dairy or expect a loose, spoonable filling; modern coconut custard pies typically use around 2 cups of liquid per 9-inch shell.
- Coconut"Grated cocoanut" means fresh coconut meat grated fine. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened flaked coconut will make the pie cloying, since there are already 8 tablespoons of sugar in the custard.
- Blind-bake the shellA puff paste shell filled with raw custard goes soggy. Bake the pastry at 425F until set and pale gold, then fill and reduce to 325-350F.
- Custard temperatureBake until the filling is set at the edge and still trembling in the center, about 170F at the middle. Carried further it curdles and weeps, which is the usual failure of this style of pie.
- The meringueThree tablespoons of sugar for five whites is a soft, old-fashioned meringue that will not hold long. Spread it so it touches the crust all round, and brown at 350-375F for 10-12 minutes rather than under a fierce top heat.
- YieldTwo pies, six slices each if you scale the filling to fit; serve cool but not fridge-cold, and eat the day it is made.
Coconut desserts spread quickly through American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, when shipping traffic from the Caribbean made whole coconuts a familiar grocery item in eastern ports. Before commercially shredded and desiccated coconut became widely available late in the century, a recipe like this one meant real labor: cracking the nut, prying out the meat, paring off the brown skin and grating it by hand, which is presumably why cookbooks of the period so often specify "grated cocoanut." The pie itself belongs to the large family of baked custard pies that filled the dessert chapters of household manuals, distinguished from a modern coconut cream pie in that the custard sets in the oven rather than being cooked on the stove and poured into a baked shell.