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Cocoa-Nut Pudding
Grate one cocoa-nut, saving the milk if perfectly sweet, boil a quart of milk, and pour upon it, adding five eggs beaten with one cup of sugar and one table-spoon butter, add a little salt, two teaspoons vanilla extract, and milk from nut, and bake in a puddingdish lined with rich paste. This is excellent baked like pie with under crust only. A plainer yet good pudding is made by pouring one and one-half pints boiling milk over one pint bread-crumbs and one cup dessicated cocoa-nut mixed; add two table-spoons sugar and nutmeg to flavor; bake. - Mrs. T. B. Johnson, Lagrange, Tenn.
This is a baked coconut custard, given first as a deep pudding in a lined dish and then as a plainer bread-crumb version. The proportions are workable, but the method assumes you know how a custard behaves.
- Pour hot milk into the eggs slowlyThe recipe says to pour boiled milk over the coconut and then add beaten eggs, which will scramble them if the milk is still near boiling. Whisk the hot milk into the egg-and-sugar mixture in a thin stream, then strain if any threads form.
- One cocoa-nutA whole coconut grates out to roughly 3 to 4 cups, about 10 to 12 oz of meat. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is a fair substitute at the same volume; sweetened flake is not, and will make the pudding cloying against the cup of sugar already called for.
- The nut milk"Milk from nut" means the thin water inside, not canned coconut milk. The instruction to save it only "if perfectly sweet" is a soundness test: if it smells sour, oily or fermented, the nut has turned and both the water and the meat should be discarded.
- OvenBake at 325 to 350F. Custard curdles and weeps above that. The pudding is done when the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass; an instant-read thermometer in the middle should show 170 to 175F.
- Rich pasteAn ordinary short pastry with a generous proportion of butter. Because the filling is wet, part-bake the shell before filling, or set the dish on a preheated baking sheet on a low rack, to keep the bottom from going grey and soft.
- TimingNo time is given. A quart of custard in a deep dish takes 50 to 70 minutes; the shallower pie version with an under crust only, 35 to 45. Judge by the wobble rather than the clock.
- The plainer versionOne and a half pints of boiling milk over a pint of crumbs and a cup of coconut, with only two tablespoons of sugar, is a bread pudding rather than a custard, and eggless as written. It bakes at the same moderate heat for about 40 minutes and is deliberately austere.
- YieldThe custard version makes a large quantity, comfortably more than a single 9-inch pie shell will hold; use a deep pudding-dish, or expect to fill more than one shell. Serves 8 or more. Cool it at least an hour before cutting, and refrigerate leftovers.
Coconut reached inland American kitchens through the shipping trade, and this contribution from Lagrange, Tennessee shows it in ordinary household use. Buckeye Cookery was published in 1877, and desiccated coconut was available to American cooks by then; it is what the second, plainer pudding calls for, in place of the labour of cracking, paring and grating a whole nut. The dish itself is a straightforward baked custard in the English tradition. Contributed recipes signed with a name and a town were the whole architecture of this book, which drew on hundreds of housekeepers rather than a single author.