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Washington Cocoanut Pie
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs, beaten 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 1/2 cup milk 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Beat butter and sugar until creamy, add egg, vanilla, cocoanut, milk and flour sifted with baking powder.
Beat well, pour into a deep greased pie pan and bake in a moderate oven from 15 to 20 minutes. Split into two layers and fill with Cream Filling. Into the upper pan of a small double boiler one tablespoon flour, stir, in three tablespoons sugar, two yolks of eggs and one cup Dromedary Cocoanut soaked in a cup of boiling milk. Cook until smooth and thick, then place between the layers. Dust with powdered sugar.
DROMEDARY
This is a butter cake baked in a pie pan, not a pie — "Washington pie" in this period means a split-and-filled layer cake. The batter and filling both want attention on the coconut.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is about 350F. Preheat fully before the batter goes in.
- The baking time is shortTwo cups of flour in one deep pie pan will not be done in 15 to 20 minutes. Divide the batter between two 8- or 9-inch pans and bake 20 to 25 minutes, or bake it in one deep pan for 30 to 35 minutes and expect to split a thicker cake. Test with a skewer at the center.
- CocoanutDromedary coconut was packaged dried shredded coconut, drier than most modern bags. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will work but pushes the cake sweeter; if using it, consider cutting the sugar in the filling to two tablespoons.
- Soak the filling coconut properlyThe cup of boiling milk poured over the coconut is doing the real work — it softens the shreds and flavors the custard. Give it ten minutes off the heat before you start cooking, or the filling will be gritty.
- The filling is thin as writtenOne tablespoon of flour and two yolks to a cup of milk gives a loose pastry cream. Cook it in the double boiler until it visibly mounds on the spoon, then chill it before it goes between the layers, or it will run out at the edges.
- Beaten eggs"2 eggs, beaten" then "add egg" means both eggs, beaten together, added to the creamed butter and sugar. Add them gradually or the mixture will curdle.
- Mixing orderThe original adds milk and flour together in one go. Alternate them in two or three additions instead, ending with flour, for an even crumb.
- YieldOne filled cake, eight servings. It keeps a day refrigerated because of the custard, but the cake dries quickly after that.
"Washington pie" is a New England construction rather than a pie at all: a plain butter cake baked in pie tins, split, and filled — most often with raspberry jam, sometimes with custard, and dusted with powdered sugar rather than iced. The name was attached to any number of cakes and puddings in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, part of a long habit of naming homely dishes after the first president; the same batter under a boiled custard filling bears a family resemblance, often noted, to what Boston later claimed as its cream pie. This version comes from a promotional booklet for Dromedary, the brand under which the Hills Brothers Company sold dates and shredded coconut, and the recipe's shape follows from that: coconut appears twice, once in the cake and once bulking out the filling, because the point of the book was to find as many uses for a package of it as possible.