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Cocoanut Pie
Line a plate with Plain Paste; fill with following mixture: two cups milk, three egg yolks, one half cup sugar, two tablespoons cornstarch, one cup grated cocoanut, one fourth teaspoon salt, grated rind and juice of one lemon, and one tablespoon butter. :
A cornstarch-thickened coconut custard in a plain pastry shell, written in the compressed style of its period: it names the filling and trusts the cook to know what to do with it. Two decisions are left unstated, and both matter.
- Baked or boiled — pick oneWith two tablespoons of cornstarch the filling can either be baked in a raw shell as a custard or cooked on the stove and poured into a blind-baked shell. Stovetop is the more reliable route: scald the milk, whisk in the sugar, cornstarch and salt, cook until thick, temper in the yolks, then finish off the heat with butter, coconut and lemon.
- Add the lemon last, off the heatAcid poured into hot milk will curdle it and can slacken cornstarch. Stir the juice and rind in once the pan is off the burner, after the starch has fully thickened.
- If you bake itThe recipe gives no oven guidance whatever, so these figures are modern: start hot, around 425F for about 10 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325-350F and bake until the centre barely trembles, roughly 30 to 40 minutes. Custard of this kind sets at about 175-180F; much past that it weeps.
- Plain PasteThe book's basic short pastry, made elsewhere in the same volume. Any all-butter or lard single crust for a 9-inch plate substitutes directly. "Line a plate" means a pie plate, not a dinner plate.
- Grated cocoanutThis may mean a fresh nut cracked and grated at home, moist and unsweetened, though packaged shredded coconut was also widely sold by 1907. Modern unsweetened desiccated or flaked coconut is much drier; steep a cup of it in a few tablespoons of the warm milk before it goes in. Sweetened bagged coconut will make the pie cloying unless you cut the sugar back.
- The three whitesThe recipe uses yolks only and says nothing about a topping, but period cookbooks commonly finished pies of this type with a meringue from the leftover whites: beat the whites with about three tablespoons sugar, spread to the crust edge, and brown at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes.
- YieldNo plate size or yield is given; two cups of milk suits roughly a 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Because it is an egg-and-milk custard, it wants refrigeration once cool and is best eaten within two days.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — one of a large family of turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by food companies to put their product in domestic circulation. Coconut reached American kitchens in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the 1890s Philadelphia firms were selling shredded coconut in packets, Brooklyn's trade being the earlier of the two, which made the ingredient far easier to come by for pies like this one. The combination here — a starch-and-yolk custard brightened with lemon and topped with the leftover whites — is the standard American cream-pie formula of the era, applied to whatever flavouring the pantry offered: lemon, chocolate, banana, or coconut.