Home › Novel Cocoanut Pies › Cocoanut and Pear Pie
Cocoanut and Pear Pie
2 cups cooked dried pears 1 tablespoon butter, 1 pinch salt 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind melted Pastry Dice pears and sweeten them to taste, add salt, cocoanut, lemon and butter. Bake between two crusts to a nice brown color. Serve hot or cold.
A winter pantry pie built from dried fruit and canned coconut, with the terse phrasing of a promotional booklet. A few things go unsaid that matter to the finished pie.
- Start with the pears"2 cups cooked dried pears" means dried pear halves covered with water, soaked an hour or so and simmered until tender, then drained and measured. Roughly 8 oz of dried pears yields the 2 cups called for; drain them well, since surplus poaching liquid is what makes the bottom crust sodden.
- Dromedary CocoanutThe Dromedary product was shredded coconut packed in a can, moister than the dry desiccated coconut sold in bulk; whether it was sweetened is not clear here. Sweetened flaked coconut will stand in, in which case cut back on the added sugar.
- "Sweeten to taste"Taste the drained pears first. With sweetened coconut, a third of a cup of sugar is usually plenty; with unsweetened coconut, closer to two-thirds. Do this before the filling goes in the shell.
- The melted butterThe line break in the original separates "butter" from "melted," but they belong together: the tablespoon is melted and stirred through the filling rather than dotted on top.
- BindingThere is no thickener here, and the filling relies on the coconut absorbing whatever moisture the pears carry. If the pears are at all juicy, a tablespoon of flour tossed with the sugar keeps the slices from weeping.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven temperature. Bake at 425F for 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F for a further 25 to 30 minutes, until the top is a nice brown. Cut steam vents.
- YieldAbout three cups of filling, enough for a shallow 8- or 9-inch double-crust pie, serving six.
Dromedary was the grocery brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates but also selling shredded coconut in sealed cans at a time when much coconut still reached the kitchen either whole and hairy or dry and bulk-scooped. Booklets like this one existed to find uses for the tin once opened, which is why the pairings tend toward novelty rather than tradition. The pear half of the pie belongs to an older habit: before reliable year-round fresh fruit, dried apples, peaches and pears were common winter pie fillings across much of the United States, stewed back to softness and stretched with whatever else the pantry held. Pairing them with canned coconut and lemon rind is the sort of combination that makes most sense in a manufacturer's pamphlet, where the point is the product rather than the dish.