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Cocoanut Fruit Pie
1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 1 cup preserved peaches 1 cup preserved shredded pineapple 2 eggs, yolks only 1 cup milk, scalded 1 teaspoon orange extract 1 tablespoon cornstarch 2 tablespoons sugar Line pie plate with pastry and bake until almost ready; then place in cocoanut, peaches and pineapple. Stir milk over yolks of eggs; add extract and cornstarch mixed with sugar. Pour this custard over cocoanut mixture; cover with strips of pastry and bake in moderate oven for twenty minutes. Serve hot or cold.
A custard-and-fruit pie from a coconut packer's promotional booklet, written for cooks who had shelves of home-preserved fruit. The main adjustments are draining that fruit and giving the custard enough oven time to actually set.
- The hinge: drain the fruit hardPreserved peaches and pineapple come packed in heavy syrup, and a cup of each carries enough liquid to keep the custard from ever setting. Drain them in a sieve, then blot on paper towel before they go into the shell.
- Dromedary CocoanutA moist-pack sweetened shredded coconut sold in a can or carton. Sweetened flaked coconut from the baking aisle is the closest match; unsweetened desiccated coconut will taste flat here and drinks up more of the custard.
- Preserved fruitHome-canned fruit in syrup, not fresh. Canned peach slices and canned crushed or shredded pineapple, both well drained, stand in directly. Raw fresh pineapple is best avoided in a custard: its bromelain can interfere with the eggs setting, though baking heat destroys the enzyme.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' in this period is conventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F.
Dromedary was the shredded-coconut brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York (no relation to the coffee roasters of the same name), and this booklet is a piece of brand advertising. Packaged moist shredded coconut was a late nineteenth-century American product, and it changed coconut from an awkward whole nut that had to be cracked, peeled and grated into a pantry staple a cook could measure by the cup and confidently ask for a cup of it in a pie.