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Cocoanut Tarts
1 quart milk 1 cup sugar Yolks of 3 eggs 2 tablespoons cornstarch ¼ pound cocoanut Heat milk in double boiler, add other ingredients and stir in the cocoanut.
While hot, fill tart shells with this mixture.
Beat to a stiff froth the whites of the 3 eggs, in which beat ½ cup cocoanut and ½ cup sugar. Spread on tarts and tinge a delicate brown.
A cornstarch-thickened coconut custard piped into pre-baked shells and finished with a coconut meringue. The book assumes you already have tart shells and a working knowledge of custard, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: cook the filling until it is truly thickA quart of milk set with only 2 tablespoons of cornstarch and three yolks is a soft custard at best, and in a double boiler it thickens slowly. Cook it, stirring, until it visibly mounds on the spoon; if you pour it in at soup consistency the tarts will weep. Slaking the cornstarch in a little cold milk first, then tempering the yolks with some of the hot milk, avoids lumps and scrambled egg.
- "Cocoanut"The period spelling of coconut. A quarter pound of the dried, shredded coconut of the period is roughly 1⅓ cups. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the filling noticeably sweeter than intended; unsweetened desiccated is closer to the original.
- Tart shellsBlind-bake them fully before filling, since the custard goes in hot and cooked and the shells get only a brief pass under heat to color the meringue. Small shells hold this better than large ones.
- Browning the meringueThe book gives no temperature; "tinge a delicate brown" means only a brief pass under heat. In a modern oven, roughly 8 to 10 minutes at 350F, or 1 to 2 minutes under a broiler with the door watched, will do it. Spread the meringue so it seals to the pastry rim, or it will shrink and slide.
- Meringue with coconut in itBeat the whites to stiff peaks first, then fold in the sugar and coconut rather than beating them in as written. Coconut is heavy and will knock the air out of whites that have not been fully whipped.
- YieldThe custard makes a generous quart or more of filling, enough for perhaps 12 to 16 tarts of 3 inches, or two 9-inch shells. Halving it is sensible for a small household.
- StorageEgg custard with a meringue top does not keep. Serve the day it is made and refrigerate any that are left, though the pastry will soften.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses flour, and it circulated in enormous numbers in Canadian kitchens from the 1910s onward, assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who used the brand. A recipe like this one shows how quickly shredded coconut moved from luxury to pantry staple: once desiccated coconut could be bought ready-prepared, a cook far from any port could treat it as casually as raisins. The three-yolk custard below and three-white meringue above is the classic thrift of the era, using the whole egg in one dish rather than leaving whites to be dealt with later. The spelling "cocoanut," standard through the nineteenth century, is generally traced to confusion with cocoa and lingered in print long after.