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Cocoa-Nut Milk Flavour
This exceedingly delicious flavouring is obtained by boiling the grated white part of the nut with fresh sweet milk, and it may be used in the composition of biscuits, cakes, custards, blancmanges, etc. To six ounces of the nut finely grated add two quarts of milk. Simmer the liquid slowly to extract the flavour without reducing the quantity of milk. Do not mix the milk from the nut until it has been tasted and found pure and sweet. It should be strained through a fine sieve, and the nut squeezed dry.
This is an infusion rather than a finished dish: coconut steeped in dairy milk, strained, and used wherever a recipe calls for plain milk. A few points make the difference between fragrant and scorched.
- The hinge: heat without reductionThe whole instruction is to extract flavour while keeping the volume. Keep the milk well below a rolling boil in a covered pan, and stir now and then. A hard simmer will both reduce the milk and catch on the bottom of the pan.
- Quantities in modern termsSix ounces of finely grated fresh coconut is roughly 2 cups loosely packed; two quarts of milk is about 2.3 litres by imperial measure (nearer 1.9 litres if read as US quarts). That is a large batch by domestic standards — halve or quarter it unless you are baking on a Victorian scale.
- "The milk from the nut"This means the thin water inside the shell, not coconut cream. Taste it before adding: in a nut that has begun to turn it is soapy or sour, and it will spoil the whole pan. Discard it if there is any doubt; the recipe works without it.
- Choosing the coconutShake a whole nut and listen for liquid — a dry one is old. Desiccated coconut can stand in, but use unsweetened, and expect a flatter flavour; sweetened flake will throw the sugar balance of anything you use the milk in.
- StrainingA fine sieve lined with muslin or a double layer of cheesecloth works better than a sieve alone. Gather the cloth and wring the pulp hard — the pulp holds back a good deal of the milk, which is why the original says to squeeze the nut dry.
- Yield and keepingYou will recover close to the volume of milk you started with, a little less for what the pulp holds. Chill immediately and use within three days; scalded dairy milk with coconut solids in it is no more stable than plain milk.
- Not coconut milkThis is not the canned coconut milk of Southeast Asian cooking, which is coconut flesh blended with water and no dairy. Substituting canned coconut milk here gives a much heavier, fattier result that will not behave the same way in a custard or blancmange.
- Using itSwap it one for one for the milk in custards, rice puddings, blancmange and cake batters. For blancmange keep in mind the coconut fat softens a set slightly, so err on the firm side with your gelatine or cornflour.
This is a technique — a flavoured milk to be drawn on by whatever else the cook is making. Coconuts reached British kitchens by sea in some quantity through the second half of the nineteenth century, and desiccated coconut, generally traced to commercial drying in Ceylon in that period, made the flavour cheap enough for everyday baking. Extracting flavour by steeping a solid in hot milk and straining it needed nothing the household did not already have. The insistence that the nut water be tasted before use is a reminder of how much of Victorian cookery writing was quality control by the senses, with no other test available.