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Cocoanut Cups
Gently stew a sliced cocoanut in the cocoanut milk for an hour, or until tender, then add juice and grated rind of one lemon or orange, a half-cup of sugar, and the beaten yolks of four eggs. Let thicken slightly, then pour into custard cups and bake fifteen minutes. Place on top the whipped whites of the eggs (with one-half cup of sugar) and brown lightly. Remove, cool, and serve.
A baked coconut custard finished with meringue, written for a cook who has just cracked a fresh nut. The instructions assume knowledge the modern reader has to supply, chiefly an oven temperature and a realistic amount of liquid.
- The hinge: keep the custard below a simmerOnce the yolks go in, the mixture must thicken over gentle heat and never bubble, or it will scramble and no amount of baking will smooth it out. Stir constantly and pull it off the moment it coats a spoon.
- "A sliced cocoanut"This means the white meat of one nut pared off the shell and shaved thin, roughly 3 to 4 cups loosely packed. Unsweetened frozen or bagged fresh coconut works; sweetened flaked coconut does not, as it is both too sweet and too fine to survive an hour of stewing.
- Not enough liquid as writtenIf "cocoanut milk" here means only the thin water inside the nut, one coconut yields about half a cup to a cup of it, which will not stew shaved meat for an hour. In that case add canned coconut milk or water to keep the coconut covered, and expect to top it up.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A baked egg custard wants a moderate oven, 325 to 350F, and the cups are best set in a pan of hot water so the edges do not set hard before the centres.
- Fifteen minutes is shortFifteen minutes only finishes a custard that has already been thickened on the stove. If yours went into the cups thin, it will need 25 to 35 minutes, until just barely set with a slight wobble at the centre.
- The meringueFour whites with half a cup of sugar makes a soft meringue. Brown it under a hot broiler for a minute or two, or in the oven at 400F, watching it the whole time; the recipe's "lightly" is the operative word.
- YieldFour to six standard 6-ounce custard cups, depending on how much liquid the coconut absorbs.
- ServingThe original says cool, not chill. Room temperature is right — cold dulls both the coconut and the citrus, and refrigeration weeps the meringue.
Recipes like this belong to the period when a whole coconut was a common grocery item and cooks were often expected to open, pare and grate it themselves; in some American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "cocoanut milk" appears to mean the thin water inside the nut, though the term was also used for liquid pressed or steeped from the grated meat, and neither is quite the canned product sold under that name today. The dish itself is a boiled-then-baked custard in individual cups, capped with the leftover whites as meringue urall all through the era, and one might read it as a thrifty structure, since a yolk-thickened custard leaves whites to be used and the cook is not going to waste them. The older, looser sense of "fruit" took in nuts and tropical imports, and the lemon or orange is presumably there to cut the richness, a familiar move in a kitchen without much else to brighten a sweet, eggy dish.