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Cocoanut Milk for Cookery
Cocoanut milk may be used in any way that cow's milk is used: for soups, stews, and dainty desserts. The milk may still be used after the shell is brown and hard throughthe proper stage is when the shell is tender enough to be cut into with a sharp, stiff, slender knife. To get all the milk at the more advanced stages the white meat should be grated, and boiling water poured over it in proportion of one scant quart to each large cocoanut. Stir this for some minutes, then strain through a cotton cloth, squeezing the cocoanut well. Let this liquid cool and it will be found that the fat rises as does cream and may be used as cream, butter, or oil. The fibre remaining may again be treated with boiling water but its quality will not be as rich. COCOANUT SOUP (Old Recipe) Scald and scrape (but do not skin) two sets of calves' feet (eight) and place in a soup-kettle with the thin-pared rind of a lemon and six blades of mace. Pour over this one gallon of cold water and let heat gradually, skimming, simmering till the calves' feet are thoroughly shredded by the long gentle cooking, when strain and set away to harden. Remove the fat from it and replace on the stove with a fine-scraped fresh cocoanut (at least a half-pound of cocoanut meat) and a pint or more of undiluted cocoanut milk or cream. (Butter and a little corn or rice flour may be substituted with milk for the cocoanut juice.) Add half a nutmeg grated; boil fifteen minutes, skimming, then serve with small French rolls or milk biscuit. Sugar may be passed with this.
Two things sit on this page: a method for extracting coconut milk from a whole nut, and a Victorian white soup built on calf's-foot stock. Both are workable today, but the vocabulary needs untangling first.
- Two different liquids called "milk"The thin, sweet liquid sloshing inside a young nut is coconut water; the rich white liquid pressed from grated meat is coconut milk. The opening paragraph slides between the two, but the extraction method described "one scant quart of boiling water per large coconut" is coconut milk proper, and that is what the soup wants.
- Scant quartRoughly 900 ml, a little under four cups, per mature coconut. That first pressing yields a thin milk by modern canned standards; the second pressing the text mentions will be thinner still and is best kept for thinning soups rather than for cream.
- The cream that risesChilled overnight, the pressed milk separates into a firm white cap of coconut fat over watery liquid. This is real and useful: the cap behaves as a solid fat at refrigerator temperature and melts at around 76F. Full-fat canned coconut milk, unshaken and chilled, does the same thing and saves the grating.
- Calves' feetEight feet in a gallon of water are there purely for gelatin the period's standard route to a stock that sets firm. Order them from a halal or Latin butcher, or substitute a well-made veal stock reinforced with gelatin. Expect four to six hours of bare simmering, not a rolling boil, or the stock will cloud.
- Strain, chill, defatThe instruction to set the stock away to harden and lift the fat is the hinge of the recipe. Coconut fat and the veal fat rendered from the feet together make the soup greasy and dull; the stock must be cold and skimmed clean before the coconut goes in.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed. Six blades is perhaps a teaspoon or more of ground mace, depending on the size of the blades, though whole blades infuse more gently -- use them if you can find them and pull them out with the straining.
- Half a nutmegThat is close to a full teaspoon freshly grated, which is assertive for a gallon of soup reduced to perhaps three quarts. Start with half that and grate more at the table.
- Final boilA hard fifteen-minute boil risks splitting the coconut milk. Hold it just under a simmer instead and give it ten minutes to marry, which is all the coconut needs.
- Yield and serviceProbably eight to ten servings. Passing sugar separately, with rolls or plain biscuit, suggests a soup sitting between sweet and savoury -- a taste the nineteenth century kept longer than we did.
Coconut soups thickened with calf's-foot stock turn up in English and American cookery through the nineteenth century, part of a family of "white soups" whose prestige rested on gelatin, almonds or cream rather than on browning. The recipe is flagged as an "Old Recipe" even within this book, which suggests it was inherited from an earlier manuscript or an older printed source. The coconut itself reached North American kitchens through the West Indies trade, and by the later nineteenth century whole nuts were being landed in northeastern ports cheaply enough that grating one for a soup was unremarkable rather than extravagant. The instruction to cut into the shell while it is still tender points to a cook working with genuinely fresh nuts, not the dried, brown-shelled ones that dominate supermarkets now, and the note that the milk keeps working after the shell hardens reads as a concession to readers who could not get them so fresh. Serving the soup with sugar passed at the table reflects a period palate that had not yet drawn a firm line between the sweet course and the savoury one.