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Cocoanut Pudding
Use rule for Buttered Bread Pudding, sprinkle each bread layer with shredded cocoanut and chopped and seeded raisins. Serve with hard sauce.
This is a variation entry: it assumes you have the book's buttered bread pudding in front of you, and only tells you what to add. The notes below fill in what the cross-reference leaves out.
- The base puddingA buttered bread pudding of this era generally means slices of bread spread with butter, layered in a dish, and covered with an egg-and-milk custard. Proportions vary from book to book, but something on the order of 4 eggs to 1 quart milk and 1/2 cup sugar, flavored with vanilla or nutmeg, is typical. If your edition's base recipe differs, follow it and use these notes only for the additions.
- Oven and donenessThe book gives no temperature; bake in a moderate oven, around 325-350F, in a pan of hot water until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean, about 45 to 60 minutes. Custard that gets too hot curdles and weeps, and the water bath is what keeps the edges from overcooking while the middle sets.
- "Cocoanut"Simply the older spelling of coconut. Around 1907 shredded coconut sold in tins or in bulk was often unsweetened and fairly dry. Modern bagged sweetened flake is moister and sweeter, so you may want to cut the sugar in the custard slightly if you use it.
- Toasting and top layerKeep the coconut between the bread layers rather than on top, or scatter only a little on the surface. Exposed shreds brown and turn bitter well before the custard sets; a loose foil cover for the first half of the baking solves it.
- "Chopped and seeded raisins"Raisins of the period were often muscats sold with seeds in, hence the instruction. Current dark or golden raisins need only a rough chop, or none at all. Soaking them ten minutes in warm water or a little rum keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar, about 1/3 cup butter to 1 cup sugar, flavored with vanilla, brandy or sherry, and chilled firm. It is served cold in a spoonful on the hot pudding, where it melts into a sauce; that contrast is the point, so do not warm it.
- Soaking timeLet the assembled dish stand 20 to 30 minutes before baking so the bread absorbs the custard. Modern sandwich bread is softer than the firm household loaf assumed here and needs less time; stale or day-old bread holds its layers far better.
- YieldA quart of custard in a 2-quart dish serves six to eight. It is best warm rather than hot, and it reheats poorly once fully chilled.
Bread pudding is a classic household thrift dish, a way of turning stale bread into something worth carrying to the table, and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks printed a base version followed by a run of variations exactly as here. The coconut is the newer element: shredded dried coconut became a cheap, shelf-stable staple in American groceries in the last quarter of the 1800s, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s worked it into cakes, pies, custards and puddings with some enthusiasm. That it appears in Lowney's Cook Book, published by a chocolate manufacturer, is a reminder that these company cookbooks were general-purpose kitchen manuals first and advertising second, with a full complement of desserts that had nothing to do with cocoa. The spelling "cocoanut" was standard for most of the nineteenth century and lingered into the twentieth, probably reinforced by confusion with cocoa itself, which is botanically unrelated.