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Cocoa-Nut Cheesecakes
Pare off the rind from a fresh cocoa-nut, grate the white part, and put it, with its weight in sifted sugar, into a perfectly clean saucepan, together with the milk, or, if this is not quite sweet, two or three spoonfuls of water. Let it simmer, stirring it gently until tender. When the mixture is cool, add the yolks of two eggs well beaten and a spoonful of orange-flower water. Line some patty-pans with good puff paste, and put a little of the mixture into each. Bake in a good oven. Sift a little sugar over the cheese-cakes before baking them. Time to boil the cocoa-nut, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d.
A Victorian tartlet in the "cheesecake" sense — a puff-pastry shell holding a rich sweet filling, no cheese involved. The recipe assumes a whole fresh coconut and a cook who can judge quantities by eye, so the proportions need pinning down before you start.
- The hinge: cook the coconut until genuinely softFresh grated coconut is fibrous and stays chewy unless it is simmered slowly in liquid until tender — the three-quarters of an hour is not padding. Undercooked, the filling reads as stringy rather than creamy.
- What the "milk" meansThis is the water inside the nut, drained before you crack it, not the tinned coconut milk sold today. One nut gives roughly half a cup to a cup; the recipe's fallback of two or three spoonfuls of water covers the case where it has soured, which it does quickly.
- Weight in sugarEqual weights of grated coconut and sugar is the confectioner's proportion and it is very sweet by modern taste. A medium nut yields about 3 to 4 cups grated, near 12 oz, so you are adding 12 oz of sugar. Two-thirds of that still sets and still tastes of the period.
- Two yolks is a small bindingFor a full nut's worth of filling, two yolks bind loosely — expect a soft, jammy interior rather than a custard. Scale up to three or four yolks if you want it to slice cleanly, and add them only once the mixture is cool or they will scramble.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually as orange blossom water, and still potent. A spoonful in this quantity is right; more turns the filling soapy. It was one of the common perfumes for sweet pastry, alongside rosewater, before vanilla extract became cheap.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins, closer to a modern shallow bun tray than a deep muffin tin. Line with puff pastry, fill no more than two-thirds, since the filling puffs a little and the pastry rises under it.
- "A good oven""A good oven" is the only guidance given — no temperature, no time. For puff paste it is conventionally read as hot, somewhere around 400 to 425F. The pastry needs the initial blast to lift, and the filling is already cooked, so it only wants setting and colouring; check it from about fifteen minutes.
- Sugar on topThe sifted sugar before baking gives a thin crackled glaze. Use caster or icing sugar; granulated will not dissolve in the time available.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. On the quantities assumed above, one coconut would fill something in the order of 18 to 24 small tartlets. They are best the day they are baked, while the pastry is still crisp under the filling.
"Cheesecake" in English cookery long outlived the cheese: by the eighteenth century the word covered many a small pastry case filled with a rich sweet mixture, curd-based or not, and lemon cheesecakes and almond cheesecakes appear in recipe books beside coconut versions. The coconut points to the later nineteenth century, when improved shipping and the colonial trades brought whole nuts more readily into British shops; the cost note of fourpence to sixpence is the book's own estimate for the dish. Orange-flower water, by contrast, points backwards: it had been a favoured flavouring in English sweet pastry since the seventeenth century and was giving ground to vanilla by the time this book was compiled. The instruction to use "a perfectly clean saucepan" is a reminder of how easily a delicate white mixture could be tainted in the metal pans of the period.