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Cocoanut Toast
Toast to a medium brown some slices of rusk and pour over them fresh cocoanut milk, slightly thickened; adding at the last shredded, tender cocoanut-fresh gathered. Serve hot with a dash of nutmeg over the whole.
A four-line invalid-cookery dish that depends entirely on the coconut being genuinely fresh. Everything else is assembly.
- What "cocoanut milk" means hereIn this period the term could mean the thin sweet water drained from a whole nut rather than the thick pressed cream sold in cans, though some writers used it for grated coconut steeped in milk. Canned coconut milk will work but gives a far richer, heavier dish; if you want the lighter effect, drain the water from one or two young coconuts.
- "Tender cocoanut, fresh gathered"This may mean the soft, almost custardy flesh of a young green coconut, which can be scooped out with a spoon; equally, "fresh gathered" may mean no more than freshly grated mature nut as opposed to desiccated shreds. If you take it as young coconut, note that mature white meat will stay chewier; frozen young coconut meat, sold in Asian groceries, is the closest reliable substitute.
- RuskA twice-baked slice of enriched bread, dry and crisp all through, closer to biscotti than to toast. Zwieback or dry rusk from a package is the direct equivalent; if you use ordinary bread, toast it slowly until it is dried out, or it will collapse into mush under the liquid.
- "Slightly thickened"No thickener is named. A teaspoon of cornstarch or arrowroot per cup of coconut liquid, cooked out for a minute or two, gives the light coating sauce intended. Do not reduce it to a pudding: the point is that the rusk absorbs it and softens without dissolving.
- Order of operationsThe recipe adds the shredded coconut "at the last"; add it off the heat, as tender coconut softens quickly once cooked.
- Serve at onceServe promptly, while the rusk is warm and yielding at the edges but still has some structure at the centre. It will not hold long.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or yield. As a starting point, allow two slices of rusk and about half a cup of thickened liquid per person; a young coconut will supply water and flesh for roughly two servings.
- NutmegGrate it over at the table. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of what makes the finish work here, since it is the only seasoning in the dish.
Coconut recipes multiplied in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, when steamships made whole nuts and desiccated shreds ordinary grocery items rather than curiosities. A dish like this one sits at the meeting point of two older traditions: milk toast, the standard nursery and sickroom supper of the nineteenth century, in which dry rusk or toast was softened with hot sweetened milk and dusted with nutmeg; and the tropical fruit cookery that readers who now had access to the ingredients were beginning to attempt. The instruction to use coconut "fresh gathered" points to the young nut with its soft flesh, rather than the mature brown nuts that arrived at northern markets. Nutmeg on a milk-and-bread dish is the older, homelier half of the recipe showing through.