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Cocoa-Nut Soup
Grate very finely the white of a fresh cocoa-nut, and simmer it gently for an hour in some good stock, allowing a quarter of a pound of cocoa-nut for every half-gallon of stock. Strain the liquid, and thicken it with some ground rice; half a pound of ground rice will be enough for this quantity. Season it with a little salt and cayenne, and a small tea-spoonful of mace. Just before serving, draw it from the fire, and add a cupful of thick cream. Time, altogether, two hours. Probable cost, 1s. per quart. Sufficient, this quantity for nine or ten persons.
A Victorian coconut soup that reads oddly to modern eyes chiefly because of its thickener: half a pound of ground rice to eight cups of stock will set almost solid. Treat that figure as the one thing to adjust and the rest of the recipe works as written.
- The ground rice is the hingeHalf a pound (8 oz) of ground rice in roughly two quarts of stock produces something closer to a pudding than a soup. Start with 2 to 3 oz, whisked to a slurry with cold stock before it goes into the hot pot, and add more only if you want it thicker.
- Cocoa-nutSimply coconut, spelled the older way. "The white" is the firm meat, grated fine; a medium coconut yields somewhere in the region of 8 to 14 oz of grated flesh, so a quarter pound is roughly a third to a half of a nut. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, rehydrated in warm stock, is a workable stand-in; sweetened flake is not.
- Half a gallonAn imperial half-gallon is about 80 fl oz, near enough 2.3 litres or 10 US cups. Scaled down, that is 4 oz of grated coconut per 10 cups of stock, which is a restrained coconut flavour by current standards.
- StockThe recipe specifies only "good stock". A clear veal or chicken broth suits the dish, unsalted or lightly salted, since the coconut and cream both mute seasoning. A well-made chicken stock is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- StrainingThe coconut is simmered for flavour and then discarded. Press the solids hard in the sieve to recover the liquid they hold, which carries most of the fat and aroma.
- MaceA teaspoon of ground mace is a firm hand by modern taste but not out of keeping with the period, when mace was a common warm spice in white soups. Blade mace bruised and simmered with the coconut, then strained out, gives a gentler result.
- The cream goes in off the heatDraw the pan from the fire before adding the cream, as directed. Ground rice thickens starchily and will catch and scorch on the bottom once dairy is in, and a boil after the cream can break the surface into flecks.
- Yield and costNine or ten servings, which fits roughly two quarts of finished soup at a small Victorian soup-plate portion. The "1s. per quart" is a period price note, not an instruction.
Coconut reached British kitchens as a colonial import, and cookery writers of the later nineteenth century treated it largely as an ingredient for sweets, curries and the occasional white soup of this kind. Cassell's places it among the thickened cream soups, seasoned with mace and cayenne much as a white veal or almond soup would be, which suggests something about how the Victorian kitchen absorbed new ingredients: by fitting them into an existing template rather than by adopting the cooking of the places they came from. Ground rice, cheap and shelf-stable, was one of the common thickeners for pale soups of the period.