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Cocoanut Pudding
½ pint (1 cup) desiccated cocoanut I quart (4 cups) milk 1/4 teaspoonful salt 4 eggs 4 heaping tablespoonfuls (4 ozs.) sugar ½ teaspoonful almond extract Beat up the eggs and add the other ingredients to
A plain baked coconut custard, and the text breaks off mid-sentence — the original directions end at "add the other ingredients to." What follows below is what the dish needs to work.
- The truncated instructionThe missing text probably continues "add the other ingredients to it"; the vessel and the method of cooking are not stated in what survives. Everything is mixed cold in one bowl; there is no cooked base.
- The measurementsThe printed page was checked: the coconut is ½ pint (1 cup), and the almond extract is ½ teaspoonful. Both figures are as our text now gives them.
- Desiccated cocoanutThis means unsweetened dried shredded coconut, not the sweetened flaked coconut sold for cakes. If you use sweetened, cut the sugar to about 2 tablespoons.
- Sugar by weightFour ounces of sugar is about half a cup — noticeably more than four modern level tablespoons. Trust the ounces.
- Casserole means earthenwareA casserole of this period was typically a lidded glazed earthenware pot for oven use, though the surviving text specifies no vessel. Any 2-quart baking dish serves.
- Oven and water bathA custard of this ratio — 4 eggs to 4 cups milk — wants a slow to moderate oven, 325F, and a pan of hot water around the dish. Higher heat curdles it and weeps whey.
- DonenessBake 50 to 70 minutes, until the edge is set and a knife an inch from the centre comes out clean; the middle should still wobble. Custard is safe and fully set at 170-175F internal, and carryover heat finishes it.
- YieldA quart of milk and four eggs gives six to eight servings. Serve warm or thoroughly chilled, not lukewarm.
Casserole cookery books proliferated in the English-speaking world at some point in the earlier twentieth century, when glazed earthenware made it respectable to bring the cooking vessel to the table. Baked custard puddings like this one were the backbone of such books: cheap, forgiving, and made almost entirely from staples a household already kept. Desiccated coconut was the enabling ingredient — commercially dried and shredded coconut became widely available in Britain and America in the later nineteenth century, turning a tropical luxury that once had to be cracked and grated at home into something bought by the packet. The almond extract is doing familiar period work, sharpening a mild dairy pudding the way bitter-almond flavouring was used across Victorian and Edwardian confectionery.