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Cocoanut Pudding
Two grated cocoanuts. 1 pound sugar. 1/4 pound butter. 8 eggs, leaving out 4 whites.
Beat the eggs separately and to the yolks add the butter, sugar, cocoanut, and whites. Add a little wine or brandy, if you like. Bake in tins lined with pastry.--Mrs. D. R.
Cocoanut Pudding.
One-half pound butter, one-half pound sugar, a whole cocoanut grated, five eggs beaten to a froth, leaving out two whites Bake in plates with pastry underneath. The oven must not be too hot. Mrs. I. H. Cocoanut Pudding.
Stir together, 1/2 pound butter. 1/2 pound sugar. A glass of wine. 6 eggs (beaten light).
When all these ingredients have been stirred together till light, add a pound of grated cocoanut, mixed with a little stale cake.--Mrs. E.T. Cocoanut Pudding. 1 pound sugar. 1/4 pound butter. 3/4 pound grated cocoanut. 1/2 pint cream. 7 whole eggs, or 9 whites and 2 yolks. 1 lemon. Half a nutmeg. Stir butter and sugar as for cake. Beat eggs well. Bake some time.--Mrs. E.G. Cocoanut Pudding.
One grated cocoanut, one pound of sugar, one quarter of a pound of melted butter, and six eggs.--Mrs. M.S.C.
Five contributors' versions of the same custard-in-pastry pie, printed one after another as community cookbooks did. All are essentially a chess-pie base — butter, sugar, eggs — carrying a great deal of fresh grated coconut.
- The hinge: low heat, and stop earlyMrs. I. H.'s "the oven must not be too hot" is the only heat guidance on the page, though it suits the others equally. These are egg custards in a shell; a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F in modern terms, is the sensible reading, and the filling is done when the outer two inches are set and the center still trembles. Carryover finishes it, and an over-baked coconut custard weeps and cracks.
- What a cocoanut yieldsOne mature coconut gives roughly 3 to 4 cups of grated meat, about 10 to 12 ounces. Mrs. E.T.'s "pound of grated cocoanut" is therefore about a coconut and a half. Unsweetened desiccated coconut can stand in, but it is far drier -- use rather less by weight, somewhere between half and two-thirds, and soak it in the cream or a little milk, since fresh coconut brings considerable moisture with it.
- A glass of wineA wineglass in nineteenth-century American cookery is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Madeira, sherry or brandy all suit; the alcohol mostly bakes off and what remains is the sweet fortified-wine flavor these puddings were built around.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup. Mrs. E.G.'s version is the only one with cream and behaves most like a true custard pie; it is the one likeliest to need the full "bake some time," probably the better part of an hour in a moderate oven.
- Whites held backTwo versions withhold whites: extra yolks make a denser, richer chess-style filling. Mrs. E.G.'s alternative of "9 whites and 2 yolks" goes the other way and would produce a paler, lighter pudding. They are not interchangeable in appearance.
- Stale cakeDry pound-cake or sponge crumbs, a small quantity, adding body to the filling. Fine dry breadcrumbs would do the same job.
- Tins and plates"Bake in tins lined with pastry" and "bake in plates with pastry underneath" both mean unbaked pie shells. Blind-baking the shell briefly before filling is worth considering, since wet custard fillings tend to soak a raw bottom crust.
- YieldMrs. D. R.'s two coconuts and pound of sugar will fill two, possibly three, 9-inch shells. The single-coconut versions make one deep pie or two shallow plate pies. Serve at room temperature or cold; hot from the oven the filling has not finished setting.
- The lemon and nutmegMrs. E.G. gives "1 lemon" without qualification — take it as the zest and juice of one, which cuts the sweetness of a full pound of sugar. Half a nutmeg freshly grated is roughly a teaspoon, and is assertive; a half teaspoon suits most modern palates.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from the receipt books of some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, which is why five women's coconut puddings sit stacked on one page under a single heading, each signed with initials rather than a full name. The dish itself is a coconut variant of what is often traced, by tradition rather than documentation, to the English transparent or chess pudding — butter, sugar and eggs beaten together and baked in a crust — a form that took deep root in the upper South. Coconuts reached Virginia ports through the Caribbean trade, and until commercially shredded coconut became widely available toward the end of the century, every one of these puddings began with the labor of husking, cracking and hand-grating the nut. Who performed that labor in the households represented here the page does not say. The wine or brandy stirred into the batter is the same fortified-wine habit that runs through the whole book, a legacy of the Madeira trade that supplied Virginia tables for well over a century.