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Cocoanut Tarts
Grate the white part of a cocoanut, add to it its own weight of sugar and one-half cup milk; stew in a sauce pan until tender. When cool, add three well beaten eggs, the grated rind of one lemon and a pinch of salt. Line patty pans with rich puff paste and fill with the cocoanut mixture. Bake from twenty minutes to half an hour.
A straightforward custard-style tart filling, but the original assumes you are cracking a fresh coconut and that you know your own oven. Two things need translating: the coconut and the missing temperature.
- The coconut"The white part" means the firm meat with the brown skin pared off; one medium coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated, about 12 oz by weight. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut works, but rehydrate desiccated in the milk before stewing or it will drink the custard dry.
- Equal weight of sugarThe recipe sets sugar by the weight of the coconut, so roughly 12 oz coconut to 12 oz sugar. Cutting the sugar to half the weight of the coconut gives a less sweet filling, and the eggs will still set it.
- Patty pansSmall individual tart tins or a 12-cup muffin tin, not a single pie plate. The quantity above fills about 12 to 16 tartlets of 2 to 3 inches.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F for the first 10 minutes to set the puff paste, then drop to 350F for the remainder of the twenty to thirty minutes, until the filling is just firm at the centre and barely domed.
- Let it cool before the eggsThe instruction to add the eggs "when cool" is the hinge. Beaten eggs stirred into a hot coconut mixture scramble, and the filling bakes grainy instead of smooth.
- Rich puff pasteAll-butter puff pastry, rolled thin. Chill the lined tins before filling so the pastry does not slump. The recipe does not call for blind-baking, though the filling is wet and some cooks may prefer to part-bake the shells.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest of one lemon; the white pith beneath turns bitter in a sweet custard.
Coconut appears often in American and British dessert cookery of the later nineteenth century as it became cheaper and more reliable to ship: whole nuts travelled well from the Caribbean, and by the end of the century commercially shredded and dried coconut was being sold in packets, turning what had been an exotic sweetmeat into a more ordinary store-cupboard item. Tarts like this one sit in a long line of English sweet custard tarts, in which ground almonds or cheese curd carried the eggs and sugar; coconut took its place in the rotation.