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Milk, Flavoured, for Sweet Dishes
Bore a hole in one end of a fresh cocoa-nut, pour off the milk, and break the shell with a hammer. Clear the nut from the outer brown rind, and grate the white part very finely. Put it into an enamelled saucepan, with a quart of new milk to every three ounces. Simmer very gently, that the milk may not be reduced in quantity. Strain, and press the nut as dry as possible. Add the milk from the nut, if quite good, to this, and use it for blancmange, custards, or sweets of any kind. Time, three-quarters of an hour to an hour. Probable cost of nuts, 4d. to 6d. each. Sufficient, three ounces of cocoa-nut to a quart of milk.
A coconut infusion, not the tinned coconut milk of today. The point is to perfume dairy milk with fresh coconut, then strain the solids out entirely.
- Two different "milks"The "milk" poured off the nut is coconut water, the thin liquid inside a fresh coconut. It is not the thick white coconut milk sold in cans, which is pressed from the grated flesh. The recipe uses the water only as a bonus at the end.
- New milkNew milk is fresh whole cow's milk, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Whole milk is the right substitute; the fat carries the coconut aroma, so skimmed milk gives a thin result.
- QuantitiesThree ounces of grated coconut to a quart (about 85 g to 1.1 litres, imperial measure) is a delicate flavour by modern standards. Doubling the coconut gives a stronger infusion, at the cost of more absorption loss.
- The hinge: gentle simmer"Simmer very gently, that the milk may not be reduced" is the whole technique. At a rolling boil the milk reduces, catches on the base and skins over; hold it at a bare tremble, well below a true boil.
- Enamelled saucepanSpecified because bare copper and iron taint milk. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan works; a heavy base also helps, since a thin one scorches milk fast.
- Straining and pressingGrated coconut soaks up a great deal of liquid. Strain through muslin and wring hard, or a noticeable share of the quart stays behind in the spent coconut.
- The coconut water caveat"If quite good" is doing real work. Coconut water sours quickly once the nut is opened, and a nut can be off before it is cracked. Taste it first; if it is sharp or soapy, discard it rather than adding it.
- Timing and yieldThree-quarters of an hour to an hour of infusion is reasonable at a low temperature. Expect a little under a quart of flavoured milk, the recipe's stated proportion for a blancmange or custard.
The entry is a preparation, not a dish: the flavoured milk is stock for the sweet course, to be turned into blancmange, custard or a cornflour mould as needed. Fresh coconuts reached British ports in quantity through the second half of the nineteenth century, and the price quoted here is fourpence to sixpence a nut. The instruction to break the shell with a hammer dates the entry as much as anything: desiccated coconut, which made this whole procedure unnecessary, is generally traced to commercial production in the 1880s and 1890s and had not yet displaced the whole nut in domestic kitchens. The method itself is simply that of steeping a flavouring in hot milk and straining it out.