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Cocoanut Cream Filling
2 cups sweet milk ½ cup white sugar 2 tablespoons Five Roses flour 1 egg ½ cup cocoanut If the cocoanut be desiccated, soak in hot milk.
This is a boiled custard filling — essentially a thin pastry cream — written in the shorthand style of a book that assumed the cook already knew how to make one. The ingredient list is complete; the method is almost entirely implied.
- The method, since the book omits itWhisk the flour and sugar together, blend in a little of the cold milk to a smooth paste, then stir in the rest. Cook over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring, until it thickens; temper in the beaten egg, cook a minute or two more until it coats a spoon, then stir in the coconut and cool with a lid or plastic wrap on the surface.
- Don't add the egg to hot milk directlyThis is the hinge. Whisk a ladle of the hot thickened milk into the beaten egg first, then return it to the pan. Dropped in whole, the egg scrambles into threads and no amount of beating will smooth it.
- CocoanutSimply coconut in the older spelling. Fresh grated coconut appears to be the assumption, with desiccated offered as the alternative; desiccated coconut is dried shred, usually unsweetened. Unsweetened suits this filling better, as the sugar is already accounted for.
- Soaking the desiccated coconutThe recipe says only to soak in hot milk; it is presumably milk taken from the two cups rather than an extra quantity, since more liquid would thin the set. A short soak softens the shreds so they don't drink liquid out of the custard later.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which appear constantly elsewhere in this book as leavening partners for soda. Use whole milk; skim gives a thin, chalky filling.
- Flour as the thickenerTwo tablespoons of flour to two cups of milk is a loose set — good for spreading between cake layers, too slack for a pie you intend to slice. Cook it a full two minutes after it bubbles to lose the raw-flour taste; unlike cornstarch, flour needs that time.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to fill a two- or three-layer cake generously. Refrigerate and use within two days; a milk-and-egg filling is not shelf-stable, and cake filled with it should be kept cold.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed to promote Five Roses flour, which is why flour appears by brand name in a custard filling that needs only two spoonfuls of it. Cookbooks of this type were assembled largely from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives, which accounts for the telegraphic style: a list of quantities and one clarifying note, on the assumption that any reader could already make a boiled custard and needed only the proportions. The parenthetical about desiccated coconut marks a change in the pantry. Shredded dried coconut had become a cheap, reliably available grocery item across North America by the early twentieth century, displacing the whole nut that earlier recipes told the cook to pierce, drain and grate by hand — and because the dried shreds are thirsty, the older proportions no longer worked without a soak.