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COCOA-NUT PUDDING (another way)
Take a large, fresh cocoa-nut, remove the brown skin, and grate the white part as finely as possible; mix very thoroughly a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, a quarter of a pound of sifted sugar, and the grated cocoa-nut; when they are quite smoothly mixed, add a pint of new milk or cream, five eggs well beaten, a tiny pinch of salt, and the eighth of a nutmeg grated. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered dish, and bake in a good oven. This pudding may be eaten either hot or cold. Time to bake, about forty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 8d., if made with milk. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A baked coconut custard, closer to a crustless pie than a steamed English pudding. The only real difficulty is the coconut itself, and the temptation to bake it too hot.
- Oven temperatureThe book says only "a good oven" and does not define it; a steady moderate heat, around 350F, suits a custard of this kind. Any hotter and the eggs curdle at the edges before the centre sets; if the top browns too fast, tent it with foil.
- The hinge: it is a custardFive eggs to a pint of milk is a custard ratio, so treat it as one. Bake until the centre is just set with a slight wobble, about 40 minutes in a shallow dish, and expect longer in a deep one. A water bath is not called for but will guarantee a smooth set.
- The coconutOne large fresh coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of finely grated flesh. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works, but use about 6 oz and soak it in some of the milk for 20 minutes first, and cut the sugar slightly if using sweetened flakes.
- Brown skinThe thin brown testa clinging to the white meat is edible but turns the pudding grey and slightly bitter. Pare it off with a vegetable peeler.
- Sifted sugarThis is caster sugar, not icing sugar. Granulated sugar works, since it dissolves in the eggs and milk.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, unskimmed. Cream gives a richer, denser result and the two are interchangeable here.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound each of butter and sugar is 4 oz, about half a cup of butter and a generous half cup of sugar. A pint in this English book is 20 fl oz, so 2 1/2 cups.
- NutmegAn eighth of a whole nutmeg is roughly a quarter teaspoon freshly grated. Grate it directly into the mixture rather than using pre-ground, which has lost most of its aromatics.
- YieldFive or six as stated, from a dish of about 1 1/2 quarts. Good cold, when it firms up and slices cleanly.
Coconut reached British kitchens in growing quantity over the second half of the nineteenth century, a period in which faster shipping from the West Indies and Ceylon is generally credited with making a whole nut a plausible, if still slightly special, grocery purchase. Cassell's spelling, "cocoa-nut", was common in this period and reflects an old confusion with cacao that the two words never quite escaped; the nut has nothing to do with chocolate. That the book gives a "probable cost" of 1s. 8d. and offers milk as an alternative to cream tells you the audience: a middle-class household keeping accounts, for whom a pudding built on a whole imported coconut and five eggs was a respectable but not extravagant dish. Desiccated coconut was already being sold commercially by this period.