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Cocoanut Soup
2 pounds veal and a knuckle bone; 1 cocoanut; 2 quarts water; 1 cup cream; 1 egg; 1 tablespoon arrowroot or nice flour; 1 tablespoon butter; salt and pepper; a blade of mace.
Rinse the veal in cold water, wipe dry, and cut in small pieces. Have the bone well cracked. Put it into the kettle with the cold water and cook slowly until the meat is very tender and the water has evaporated nearly one-half. Add the grated cocoanut and simmer for another half-hour. Strain, and add the milk of the cocoanut and the cream. Let it come to a boil, and add the arrowroot or flour; rub to a cream with the butter. Salt and pepper to taste; let it boil until it thickens. Remove from the fire and add in the lightly beaten egg, stirring briskly.
Serve at once with small triangles of crisp toasted bread. This soup should not be allowed to stand long after the egg is added.
A veal stock enriched with fresh coconut and finished with egg, in the style of the white soups popular around 1900. The finish is the whole difficulty: the egg must go in off the heat or the soup curdles.
- Egg finishTake the pot off the burner, let it stop bubbling, then stir the beaten egg in briskly — ideally after tempering it with a ladleful of the hot soup. Returning it to the heat, or reheating leftovers, will scramble it into threads.
- The maceA blade of mace is a piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg; add it with the water at the start and remove it at the straining. A scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace, added in the last few minutes, is an acceptable substitute.
- Fresh coconut"The milk of the cocoanut" here means the thin water inside the shell, not canned coconut milk. Pierce and drain the nut, reserve the liquid, then crack it, pry out the meat and grate it. One nut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated meat and about 1/2 to 1 cup water. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, about 2 cups, will do at a pinch; sweetened flake will not.
- Timing the stockTwo quarts reduced by nearly half over low heat takes 2 1/2 to 3 hours with veal and a cracked knuckle. Skim the grey foam in the first twenty minutes or the finished soup will be cloudy.
- Knuckle boneAsk a butcher to saw a veal knuckle or shank crosswise; the exposed marrow and gelatin are what give the soup body. A little extra arrowroot compensates if you can only get boneless veal.
- Arrowroot vs. flourRub the starch and butter to a paste, then whisk it in. Arrowroot thickens almost immediately and turns thin if boiled hard; flour needs a good two or three minutes at a simmer to lose its raw taste.
- "Add the cream" and "the milk"The instruction to add "the milk" refers to the coconut water just named; no dairy milk is called for beyond the cup of cream.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 quarts after reduction and enrichment — five or six modest first-course servings. Serve immediately, with the toast points cut thin and crisped.
White soups thickened with almonds or, later, coconut belong to a long European line running back through medieval almond-milk cookery, where a pale, nut-enriched dish was a mark of a refined table. By the late nineteenth century coconuts were reaching North American markets from the Caribbean in quantity and cheaply enough that household compilations like this one could treat a whole nut as an ordinary ingredient rather than a curiosity. Here the coconut is a flavouring laid over a conventional veal stock, rather than the base of the soup as it would be in Southeast Asian cooking. The egg-and-cream liaison added at the last moment, with a warning not to let the soup stand, is a common finish in period recipes of this kind.