Cocoa-Nut Pie
One pint milk, a cocoa-nut, tea-cup sugar, three eggs; grate cocoanut, mix with the yolks of the eggs and sugar, stir in the milk, filling the pan even full, and bake. Beat whites of eggs to froth, stirring in three table-spoons pulverized sugar, pour over pie and bake to a light brown. If prepared cocoa-nut is used, one heaping tea-cup is required. - Miss N. B. Brown, Washington City.
A single-crust coconut custard with a meringue lid. The recipe assumes you already have an unbaked pastry shell in the pan and that you know a custard is done when it is barely set.
- Teacup measureA period tea-cup is generally reckoned smaller than a modern 8-ounce cup, often about 3/4 cup, though the book does not spell this out. About 3/4 cup sugar in the custard is a safe reading; more will make it cloying against the coconut.
- One cocoa-nutA whole coconut, cracked, drained and grated, yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of fresh shreds — far more than the pint of milk can carry. Two cups of freshly grated meat is closer to what this filling wants. The alternative given, a heaping teacup of "prepared" (dried, ready-grated) coconut, is about 1 cup.
- The crust is assumedNo pastry is listed; the book gives its paste recipes separately elsewhere in its pastry material. Line a 9-inch pan with plain short crust; because the filling is wet, blind-bake the shell partway before it goes in.
- Oven heatBake the custard at 325–350°F. Hotter than that and the eggs curdle and weep water into the crust. Reckon 35 to 45 minutes.
- Judging donenessThe custard is set when the outer two inches are firm and the center still shivers when the pan is nudged. It finishes setting as it cools, and carryover heat will overcook it if you wait for a firm middle.
- Meringue stageThree tablespoons pulverized (superfine) sugar to three whites is a soft, old-style meringue. Beat to firm peaks, spread so it touches the crust all round to stop shrinkage, and return to the oven — 350°F for 10 to 12 minutes browns it without drying the custard beneath.
- "Filling the pan even full"Fill only to about a quarter-inch below the rim. The custard rises slightly before it sets, and a brimming pan will overflow.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Serve at room temperature or cold; meringue-topped custards do not refrigerate gracefully for more than a day.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877, Marysville, Ohio) collected recipes by name from contributors across the country, which is why this one carries Miss N. B. Brown of Washington City. Coconut pies are often associated with the second half of the nineteenth century, though grated coconut puddings and pies appear in American and English cookery earlier; sea traffic from the Caribbean is generally credited with making whole nuts a reliable if slightly festive grocery in inland American towns, and packaged "prepared" desiccated coconut, usually dated later, is at least attested by the recipe's alternate measurement. The structure is older than the ingredient: a sweetened egg-and-milk custard baked in a paste shell and crowned with a whipped-white meringue is the same formula behind lemon and cream pies of the period, with grated coconut standing in for the flavoring.