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Cocoa-Nut Sauce
Two table-spoons butter, cup of sugar, table-spoon of flour, milk of one cocoa-nut, with a small piece grated.
A dessert sauce written in the shorthand of a book that assumed its reader already knew how a sweet pudding sauce behaves. The proportions are given; the method is not.
- What is missingThere is no instruction and no cooking time. Read it as a standard flour-thickened sweet sauce: melt the butter, stir in the flour, add the coconut liquid gradually, then the sugar, and simmer a few minutes until it thickens and the raw flour taste is gone.
- "Milk of one cocoa-nut"In a book of this date this most often means the thin water drained from a fresh nut rather than a thick pressed liquid; some period recipes, though, make "cocoanut milk" by steeping grated flesh in hot water or milk. A mature coconut usually gives somewhere between half a cup and a cup and a half of water, so on the first reading the sauce is thin and lightly flavoured. Modern canned coconut milk will give a far richer, heavier result.
- "A small piece grated"Genuinely vague. Two to three tablespoons of freshly grated coconut is a reasonable reading; it is there for texture and aroma rather than body. Desiccated coconut works, but check the packet, as much of it is sweetened, and reduce the sugar if so.
- SugarA full cup against one tablespoon of flour and under a cup of liquid makes a very sweet, syrupy sauce by modern taste. Halving the sugar is worth considering over a plain pudding.
- Opening a coconutPierce two of the three eyes at the stem end (usually only one is soft enough to give easily) and drain the water through a strainer before cracking the shell; the water often carries shell fragments and fibre. Taste it before using, as coconut water sours quickly and a bad nut smells sharply fermented.
- Heat and lumpsAdd the coconut water in stages off the boil and whisk between additions. Because there is so little flour relative to sugar, the sauce sets only lightly and will thin further if held hot for long; make it just before serving.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup and a half, enough for four to six servings. Intended warm over steamed or boiled puddings, cottage pudding or plain cake.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first issued in 1877 out of Marysville, Ohio, and reprinted for decades, belongs to the era when whole coconuts had become a reliable item in American markets, carried north from the Caribbean. Before that, coconut in a Midwestern kitchen meant an expensive novelty; by the 1870s and 1880s cookbooks are full of coconut cakes, pies, custards and puddings, and grating the nut by hand was ordinary household work. The sauce also shows the standard nineteenth-century pudding-sauce formula at its plainest: butter, sugar, a spoonful of flour and whatever liquid was on hand, which elsewhere in these books might be water, milk, wine or fruit juice. That the coconut water is used at all rather than discarded is a small mark of the frugality that runs through the whole volume.