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Cocoanut Bread Pudding
1 cup bread crumbs Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons sugar 2 cups milk 1/4 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 2 eggs Grated nutmeg to taste 1 tablespoon melted butter Put the cocoanut into a basin, add the bread crumbs, salt, nutmeg, sugar, milk, eggs well beaten, and the melted butter. Allow to soak for 1 hour, then pour into a buttered pudding dish, and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour. Serve hot with cream.
A plain baked custard stiffened with bread and coconut. It works if you treat it as a custard rather than a bread bake, which means watching the set rather than the clock.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is generally read as about 350F, and the lower end of that range suits a custard. Higher and the egg proteins tighten and weep liquid before the center sets.
- The half hour is a minimumThirty minutes suits a shallow dish about 7-8 inches across. In a deeper dish it will take 45-55 minutes. Judge it by the center: barely wobbling, and a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean, roughly 170-175F internal.
- Do not skip the soakThe hour of soaking lets the crumbs and the coconut soften and swell. Bake it straight away and you risk gritty coconut suspended in thin custard with a dry crust of crumbs on top.
- Dromedary CocoanutA packaged shredded coconut of the period, moister than modern desiccated coconut and probably sweetened. Sweetened flake coconut is the closest supermarket match; if you use unsweetened desiccated coconut, you may want another tablespoon of sugar.
- "Basin"Simply a mixing bowl. British and Anglo-American cookbooks of the era used the word for any deep kitchen bowl.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn or grated from day-old white bread, not the dry sandy kind sold for breading. A cup of dried commercial crumbs absorbs far more milk and gives a heavy, pasty pudding.
- Water bathNot called for, but setting the dish in a pan of hot water gives a smoother custard and forgives a few extra minutes in the oven.
- YieldFour modest servings. The cream poured over at the table is part of the dish, not a garnish.
Bread pudding is often held up as thrift cookery of the oldest sort, a way of turning stale loaf ends into a dish worth serving, and by the late nineteenth century it seems to have become respectable enough to serve to company, with nutmeg and cream. What dates this version is the coconut. Dried shredded coconut became a pantry staple in America once the fruit could be commercially dried and shredded; the Dromedary brand, run by the Hills Brothers Company of New York, sold coconut in tins alongside its dates and promoted it through small recipe booklets like this one. The booklets often seem to work in a familiar way: take dishes every cook already knew, insert a quarter cup of the product, and print the result under the brand name.