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Cocoanut Filling
1 egg ⅓ cup Five Roses flour ½ cup sugar 1 cup boiling milk.
Mix egg, flour and sugar together.
Put in the boiling milk and boil until it thickens, stirring all the time. Use flavouring to taste and 1 tablespoon of shredded cocoanut.
A flour-thickened pastry cream, written in the compressed style of a flour-company pamphlet — the ingredient list omits the egg the method calls for. A few gaps need filling before it works.
- The missing eggThe method says "mix egg, flour and sugar" but no egg appears in the list. One egg is the sensible reading for a cup of milk; two yolks give a richer set. The original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- TemperingPouring a cup of boiling milk onto a raw egg all at once will scramble it. Whisk the flour and sugar with the egg to a smooth paste first, then add the hot milk in a thin stream while whisking, and return the lot to the pan.
- Boil it, and mean itFlour-thickened creams must actually reach a boil and hold it a minute or two, or they taste of raw starch and thin out again as they cool. The starch also protects the egg from curdling at that temperature.
- Cocoanut"Shredded cocoanut" of this period was generally dry desiccated coconut, usually unsweetened. Modern sweetened flake is wetter and much sweeter; if you use it, cut the sugar back a little.
- How much coconutOne tablespoon in a whole cup of filling is barely a suggestion of coconut. Two to four tablespoons gives the flavour most people expect, and toasting it first helps.
- Flavouring"Flavouring to taste" most often meant vanilla extract, though almond or lemon were also used; half a teaspoon of vanilla, stirred in off the heat so it does not cook off, suits this filling.
- YieldOne cup of milk makes a little over a cup of filling: enough for a shallow single pie or to fill a cake. The recipe does not say which it was meant for. If you want any real depth in a pie, double the whole thing.
- FinishingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper onto the surface while it cools or it will skin over. It is cooked through on the stove, so it needs no further baking; if you use it in a pie, a fully baked, cooled shell is the way to go.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, one of the great Canadian flour-brand cookbooks of the early twentieth century, and like its American counterparts it was closely tied to the promotion of the brand. Many of its recipes were submitted by customers, which explains the telegraphic style and the occasional dropped ingredient. Coconut itself was by then an ordinary grocery item across North America rather than a luxury: desiccated shredded coconut had been produced commercially since the late nineteenth century, sold in packets and boxes, an easy way to make a plain flour-and-milk cream taste like something more.