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Cocoanut Cheese Pies
1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 1 cup cottage cheese 2 cups milk 4 eggs, separated 4 tablespoons sugar 1 lemon 1 pinch salt Pie crust Chop cocoanut and soak it in the milk for 20 minutes. Beat yolks of eggs and sugar for 10 minutes, add cheese, salt, and beat well, then stir in cocoanut, milk and grated rind of lemon. Line two pie plates with pastry. Divide mixture into them and bake in a moderate oven until firm to the touch. Beat whites of eggs to a stiff froth, then beat in two tablespoons sugar and one tablespoon lemon juice. Spread meringue over pies and return to oven to brown lightly. Serve cold.
A baked custard pie in the cheesecake family, thinned with milk and lightened with a meringue lid. The original assumes a hand whisk, a drier curd cheese than most tubs sold today, and an oven judged by feel.
- The hinge: bake gently and stop earlyThis is a custard, not a cheesecake — four yolks to two cups milk is a loose set. Pull the pies when the edges are firm and a two-inch circle at the centre still trembles; residual heat and the return to the oven for the meringue finish it. Baked to firm all the way across, it weeps and turns watery under the meringue.
- "A moderate oven"350F. At that temperature two shallow pies take roughly 35 to 45 minutes to reach the point above. For the meringue, return them at the same 350F for 10 to 15 minutes, or 400F for 5 to 8 if you want faster colour.
- Dromedary CocoanutThe brand's packaged shredded coconut. Sweetened flake is the closest match; if you use unsweetened desiccated, add a tablespoon of sugar to the filling. "Chop" means run a knife through the shreds so they distribute rather than mat.
- Cottage cheeseCottage cheese of this period was generally drier and smaller-curd than modern tubs, and often homemade. Modern creamed cottage cheese carries far more liquid — drain it in a sieve for 20 minutes, then press it through the sieve or blend it smooth, or the filling bakes up lumpy.
- Ten minutes of beatingThat is hand-whisk time. Three to four minutes with an electric mixer on medium-high gets the yolks and sugar equally pale and thick.
- The crustA wet filling in raw pastry gives a soft base. Blind-bake the shells at 400F until set and just colouring, then cool them slightly before filling and dropping the oven to 350F.
- The lemonThe rind goes into the custard, the juice into the meringue. Zest the lemon before juicing it, and keep the white pith out.
- Yield and servingTwo 8- or 9-inch pies, eight to twelve servings. The instruction to serve cold matters — the custard slices cleanly only once chilled. Refrigerate, and keep no more than two days, as meringue over custard sweats.
Dromedary was the coconut and date line of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, and this booklet is a promotional recipe book of the kind food manufacturers issued by the thousand in the early twentieth century: the aim is to persuade a cook that packaged shredded coconut belongs in dishes she already makes. Coconut cheese pie sits in a long Anglo-American line of curd tarts and cheesecakes — Yorkshire curd tart, Maids of Honour, the Pennsylvania and Southern "cheese pies" — all built on fresh unripened cheese, eggs, sugar and lemon peel, and all dating from a time when cottage cheese was a by-product of the household milk supply rather than a purchase. The novelty the booklet is selling is the coconut, which by the 1900s had gone from an expensive whole-nut import to a cheap shelf-stable staple, and the meringue top, a nineteenth-century habit that let a thrifty cook use the whites she had left over from the custard.