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Cocoanut and Orange Pie
1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 4 oranges 1 cup sugar 3 eggs, separated 2 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons butter, melted Pastry Meringue Mix cocoanut with grated rind of one orange, add strained juice of oranges, sugar, yolks of eggs, flour and butter. Pour into pastrylined pie plate and bake in moderate oven. Cover with a meringue made of whites of the eggs, sprinkle over with sugar and cocoanut and brown lightly in oven.
A branded booklet recipe that assumes you know how a custard pie behaves. The instructions give no oven temperature, no pan size and no bake time, so the numbers below are the ones worth filling in.
- The hinge: bake it low and slow enough to setThis is an egg-and-citrus custard, close kin to lemon meringue filling but baked in the shell rather than cooked on the stove. It is done when the centre is just barely wobbly, not liquid; overbaking curdles the yolks and weeps juice under the meringue.
- "Moderate oven"350F. Expect roughly 35-45 minutes in a 9-inch shell for the first bake. The meringue browns at a higher heat, 400-425F for 5-8 minutes, or under a low broiler with constant watching.
- Dromedary CocoanutPackaged shredded coconut, sold in tins and cartons. Whether this line was sweetened is not certain; period packaged shred was often plain desiccated coconut. Modern sweetened flake is the closest widely available match, though it will make a sweeter pie; unsweetened desiccated coconut also works, and dried flake is best soaked briefly in a little of the orange juice.
- Four orangesFour modern navels give well over a cup of juice, which will slacken the custard. Measure to about 1 cup of strained juice plus the grated zest of one orange, and stop there.
- Pastry and a soggy baseA wet filling in a raw shell is the usual cause of a pale, damp bottom. Blind-bake the crust at 400F until set and dry, about 15 minutes, before filling.
- The meringueThree whites beaten to soft peaks with about 6 tablespoons sugar. Spread it so it touches the pastry rim all the way round, which stops it shrinking inward, then sprinkle with sugar and coconut as directed. The coconut colours fast, so watch the last two minutes.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Cool completely before cutting or the custard will run.
Dromedary was the grocery brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates and for packaged shredded coconut, and like most food manufacturers of the era it published small recipe booklets whose real purpose was to find more uses for a single product. The recipe itself is a straightforward orange curd baked in a shell under meringue, a form that spread widely once cheap cane sugar and reliable packaged coconut made both elements everyday pantry items rather than luxuries. Shredded coconut in tins and cartons was among the first genuinely convenient tropical ingredients in the American kitchen, and its arrival in the late nineteenth century is often said to have encouraged the bloom of coconut cakes, pies and puddings in household cookery of the following decades.