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Cocoanut Patty Pans
2 ounces cocolanka 1 egg 1½ ounces castor sugar ½ pound pastry (short or puff) 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour 1½ ounces butter Line a dozen patty pans, cream the butter and sugar, add the egg and flour.
Lastly, add the cocoanut. Put a teaspoon of this mixture into each patty pan, and bake about 15 minutes.
A plain British-style coconut frangipane baked in pastry cases, given in weights with no oven temperature. Two things need settling before you start: what cocolanka is, and how hot to bake.
- CocolankaEvidently desiccated (dried, finely shredded) coconut; the recipe itself calls it "cocoanut" further down, and the name appears to be a trade name of the period. Use 2 oz of unsweetened desiccated coconut, roughly two-thirds of a cup loosely packed; sweetened flake will make the filling cloying and heavier.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar, not confectioners'. Ordinary granulated will work in a creamed butter mixture, though superfine dissolves faster and gives a smoother filling. 1½ ounces is about 3 to 3½ tablespoons.
- Patty pansShallow individual tartlet tins, about 2 to 2½ inches across, not modern deep muffin cups. A standard 12-cup mini-muffin or shallow tart tray is the nearest equivalent; if you use deep cups the pastry will dominate.
- Oven heatNone is given. For small pastry cases with an egg-and-butter filling, something in the region of 375-400F is a reasonable modern guess: hot enough to set the pastry base before the filling weeps, moderate enough that the coconut does not scorch in fifteen minutes. The figure is not in the original.
- The quantity of fillingA teaspoon per pan sounds mean, and by the recipe's own weights twelve level teaspoons would use only a fraction of the mixture, so a heaped spoon is likely meant. Do not overfill: the mixture puffs as the egg sets, and an overfilled case will dome, crack and spill over the pastry rim.
- The tablespoon of flourIt is a binder, not a cake structure. Fold it and the coconut in gently at the end; beating hard after the egg goes in makes the filling tough and rubbery rather than short.
- PastryHalf a pound is a modest amount, enough for a dozen small cases rolled thin (a batch made with about 5 oz flour). Short crust gives a crisper, more biscuit-like shell; puff will rise up the sides and leave less room for filling.
- Yield and keepingTwelve small tarts. Best the day they are made; the coconut draws moisture from the air and the pastry softens by the second day.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour, and like other milling-company books of the period it appears to lean heavily on British domestic baking, which is where patty pans come from. A patty pan was simply a small shallow tin for individual pastries, and the filling here is a coconut version of the almond-and-butter mixture used in maids of honour and Bakewell-type tarts, a substitution often said to have followed the arrival of desiccated coconut, shipped dried from Ceylon and the West Indies, at a price and keeping quality suited to ordinary Canadian kitchens. The naming of a specific branded coconut alongside the mill's own flour is characteristic of these books, which functioned as advertising as much as instruction.