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Cocoanut Custard Pie
2 eggs Salt Beat eggs, add to milk, sugar and cocoanut. Pour in unbaked pastry shell and bake 30 minutes.
Mrs. Fern Gover.
The printed ingredient list has been cropped in the original book — only eggs and salt survive, though the method calls for milk, sugar and cocoanut as well. What follows fills in the assumptions a cook of the period would have brought to the page.
- The missing quantitiesThere is no way to recover the exact amounts Mrs. Gover intended. A two-egg custard pie of this general type might take somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 cups milk, 1/2 cup sugar, a pinch of salt and about 1 cup of cocoanut for a 9-inch shell; treat that as a guess, not a transcription, and note that two eggs to a full two cups of milk gives a soft set.
- No oven temperature is givenCommunity books of this period assumed the cook knew her range. Custard pies are conventionally started hot, around 425F for the first ten minutes to set the crust, then dropped to 325-350F for the remainder. Thirty minutes total is at the short end and suits a shallow filling.
- "Cocoanut"The older spelling. In a church or club book of this kind it would have meant commercially prepared shredded or desiccated coconut, sold in bulk or in tins; whether sweetened or not varied by brand. Modern moist sweetened flake behaves differently from dry desiccated coconut, which absorbs custard — with the drier product expect a firmer, less creamy set.
- Scald the milkThe recipe does not say whether the milk was heated; scalding was common in custard recipes but plenty of cooks used it cold. If you do heat the milk, temper the beaten eggs in slowly, as adding them to hot milk will curdle them.
- The unbaked shellCustard poured raw into raw pastry is the usual cause of a sodden bottom. Chill the lined pan hard before filling, and set the pie on a preheated baking sheet or the lowest rack so the base gets direct heat.
- Judging donenessThe custard is done when the outer two inches are set and the center still wobbles as a single mass; it firms as it cools. Baked until uniformly firm, it will weep and crack. A knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean.
- Yield and servingThe shell size is not given; on the reconstruction above, one 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Cool completely before cutting, and refrigerate leftovers -- this is an egg-and-milk custard and should not sit out.
Cocoanut custard pie belongs to the large family of American "transparent" and custard pies -- eggs, milk, sugar, a flavoring, poured into a single crust -- which were cheap, quick and made from things already in the pantry. Shredded and desiccated coconut became a routine grocery item over the later nineteenth century, as commercial drying and tinning made the imported nut available inland year-round, and it turns up constantly in church and club cookbooks of the following decades. The attribution to Mrs. Fern Gover is characteristic of a fundraising cookbook: recipes were collected from the membership by name, so the book doubles as a list of contributors.