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Cocoa-Nut Pudding
Mix two eggs, well beaten, with a cupful of new milk and the milk of the cocoa-nut, if the latter is quite sweet. Take off the brown skin of the nut, and grate the white part as finely as possible. Mix it with three table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, three table spoonfuls of sifted sugar, two ounces of butter beaten to cream, six ounces of Muscatel raisins, and a tea-spoonful of lemon-rind thinly sliced. Beat all well together, pour the mixture into a well-buttered pie-dish, and bake it in a rather slow oven. Turn it out, and serve with sifted sugar strewn over it. This pudding may be either baked or boiled. Time to bake, one hour and a half; to boil, three hours. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian baked pudding built on a whole fresh coconut, closer to a bread-and-butter custard than to the dense macaroon-style coconut puddings of later cookbooks. Most of the work is in the nut.
- The nut is the recipe's hingePierce the eyes, drain the water, then bake the shell at 375F for 15 minutes or so until it cracks; the flesh lifts away far more easily. Pare off the brown testa with a vegetable peeler before grating, or the pudding will be flecked and slightly bitter.
- How much coconutThe original assumes one nut and never says so in weight. A medium coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups (about 250-300 g) of finely grated flesh.
- "If the latter is quite sweet"Coconut water sours quickly inside a cracked or old nut. Taste it; if it is sharp, soapy or oily, discard it and use a full cup of milk alone. This is a genuine spoilage check, not a matter of preference.
- A rather slow oven300 to 325F. The mixture is essentially an egg custard bound with crumbs, and a hotter oven will curdle it and weep. An hour and a half at that temperature is about right for a pie dish holding a litre.
- Sifted sugarCaster (superfine) sugar, sifted to break lumps, both in the batter and strewn over at the end.
- Muscatel raisinsLarge sweet raisins from muscat grapes, sold with their stones in and stoned by hand at home. Muscat raisins are still available; ordinary large raisins or sultanas substitute without much loss. Six ounces is about 170 g.
- Lemon-rind thinly slicedPare the yellow zest with a knife or peeler, avoiding pith, then shred it as finely as possible. A teaspoonful of shreds is roughly the zest of half a lemon; grated zest works and distributes better.
- If you boil it insteadThree hours in a buttered pudding basin, covered (a floured cloth traditionally, or pleated paper and foil) and kept immersed in steadily simmering water, topped up as it evaporates. Do not let the pan boil dry.
- Turning outA custard-heavy pudding needs 10 minutes' rest out of the oven before it will release cleanly. Run a knife round the edge and invert onto a warm dish.
- YieldFour to five, as stated. The "probable cost, 1s. 3d." is a period price guide, a standing feature of Victorian cookery dictionaries, not an instruction.
Coconuts reached British kitchens in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, when faster steamships and the West Indian and Ceylon trades made a whole nut an affordable novelty rather than a curiosity, and desiccated coconut only began displacing the fresh article towards the end of the century. That is why this recipe spends its first lines on cracking, skinning and grating: the reader was expected to buy the nut whole and reduce it herself. The construction underneath is thoroughly domestic and much older than the coconut in it, being the standard English baked pudding of eggs, milk, breadcrumbs, creamed butter, dried fruit and lemon peel, with the grated nut simply taking the place of ground almonds or extra crumbs. The alternative of baking or boiling is given without comment, as was common in the period.