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Cocoanut Pie
1/2 pint (I cup) chopped cocoanut 1 pint (2 cups) milk 2 eggs 6 ozs. (3/4 cup) sugar 2 ozs. (2 heaping tablespoonfuls) cornstarch Pinch of salt I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) butter ½ teaspoonful almond extract I lemon Line a fireproof dish with pastry. Mix the cornstarch and the sugar together, add the eggs well beaten, the milk, butter, cocoanut, salt, almond extract, and the grated rind and the strained juice of the lemon. Pour into the prepared dish and bake in a hot oven till firm.
A single-crust custard pie thickened with cornstarch as well as egg, written for an earthenware baking dish rather than a metal pie tin. A few of its instructions need translating before it will behave.
- The hinge: oven heatA "hot oven" in period sources is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F, which will set the pastry but risks curdling a milk-and-egg custard into something grainy and weeping. Start at 425F for the first 10-15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325-350F and bake until the centre wobbles as one piece, roughly 35-45 minutes more.
- "Fireproof dish"The term generally indicates a glazed earthenware or other heatproof baking dish, not a covered casserole in the modern sense. A 9-inch pie plate holds this filling; deep ovenproof china works but adds baking time.
- Cocoanut"Chopped" points to fresh coconut, cracked, pared and grated, which is moist and only faintly sweet, though packaged desiccated coconut was also on sale by this date. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the pie cloying — use unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut, and if you use desiccated, soak it in a little of the milk first.
- Lemon and milkThe strained juice of a whole lemon going into two cups of milk will curdle it on contact. Beat the juice in last, just before pouring, and expect the mixture to look slightly broken; the cornstarch and eggs pull it together in the oven.
- Almond extractA teaspoon and a half is a heavy hand by current standards. Half a teaspoon is closer to what most palates will want here.
- The cornstarchTwo heaping tablespoons is a lot of starch for two cups of milk, and it will settle if the mixture stands. Whisk the starch and sugar together dry, as directed, and stir the filling again immediately before pouring.
- PastryNo blind baking is called for, and with a wet filling the base will stay soft. A partially blind-baked shell, cooled before filling, gives a better result in a shallow pie plate.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Cool completely before cutting — the starch and egg both need to set, and a warm slice will slump.
Coconut arrived in American and British kitchens through the West Indies trade, and by the second half of the nineteenth century desiccated coconut was being manufactured in quantity, which is what put coconut pies, cakes and puddings within reach of ordinary households rather than only ports and wealthy tables. This version belongs to the large family of cornstarch-stiffened custard pies found in late-Victorian and Edwardian dessert chapters: cornstarch was cheap, reliable and forgiving where a pure egg custard was not, and it let a cook stretch two eggs across a whole pie. Its appearance in print reflects a real shift in equipment around the turn of the century, when heatproof earthenware and, shortly after, ovenproof glass began to be marketed for baking and serving in the same vessel. The pairing of coconut with almond extract and lemon was conventional in the period.