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Cocoanut Tapioca Cream
Follow directions for making Tapioca Cream, stirring into the cream one-half cup of Larkin Shredded Cocoanut before adding the meringue. Serve very cold with jelly
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe, so it only makes sense alongside the book's Tapioca Cream: a stovetop custard of milk, sugar, egg yolks and pearl or minute tapioca, finished with the beaten whites. A few things need translating.
- The hinge: add the coconut off the heatThe hinge: add the coconut before the meringue -- The recipe places the coconut in the finished cream, ahead of the beaten whites. Practically that means stirring it into the cooked custard and then folding in the meringue; coconut stirred in earlier will absorb liquid and sit on the bottom of the pan, where an egg-thickened custard catches easily.
- Larkin Shredded CocoanutA house-brand grocery item of the Larkin Company. The exact cut and whether it was sweetened are not recorded here; unsweetened desiccated or fine-shred coconut is the safest modern stand-in, and sweetened flake may make the dessert cloying unless you cut the sugar in the custard.
- Tapioca then and nowPeriod recipes may mean either pearl tapioca, which was normally soaked before cooking, or the packaged quick-cooking sort. Minute (quick-cooking) tapioca is the practical substitute and cooks in about five minutes; do not soak it, and do not swap in instant pudding mix.
- The meringueThe beaten whites are folded into the hot custard, which does not reliably bring them to a safe temperature. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites, or spread the meringue on top and brown it in a moderate oven.
- Cooking the custardKeep it below a simmer and stir constantly. It is done when it coats the back of a spoon; boiling curdles the yolks and no amount of beating recovers it.
- "Serve very cold with jelly"Jelly here means a clear fruit jelly, currant being a common choice, spooned over or served alongside, not a gelatine dessert. Chill the cream well, covered, so a skin does not form.
Tapioca cream was one of the workhorse desserts of the American middle-class table between about 1870 and 1930: cheap, made from pantry staples, and forgiving enough for a young cook. The tapioca itself came from cassava starch shipped from Brazil and the East Indies, and its arrival in packaged, quick-cooking form near the turn of the century is often credited with helping to spread puddings like this through household manuals. The coconut version belongs to the same moment — commercially shredded coconut became a widely stocked grocery item in the late nineteenth century, and desserts that had once required cracking and grating a whole nut became a matter of opening a box. The Larkin reference is the tell that this page comes out of a manufacturer's promotional cookery book: Larkin, the Buffalo soap and mail-order firm, sold groceries and household goods direct to customers and published recipe collections that named its own products at every turn, so the shredded coconut here is as much advertising as ingredient.