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Cocoanut Cream Pie
1 pint of milk 1/2 cup cocoanut 1/4 cup sugar 2 tablespoons powdered sugar 1/2 cup flour Steep the cocoanut in one and one-half cups of the milk for twenty minutes. Strain and thicken with the flour, rubbed smooth with the remainder of the milk. Cook at least twenty minutes in a double boiler. Cool slightly and turn into a baked crust.
Make a meringue of whipped cream, vegetable gelatine and powdered sugar. Spread or pile unevenly over the filling. Many prefer the little peaks of meringue to that which is evenly spread over the pie.
An eggless custard pie thickened entirely with flour, from a book written for cooks avoiding meat and, here, animal gelatin. Two things need attention: the sugar is never actually added in the method, and the "meringue" is a stabilized whipped cream, not egg white.
- Where the sugar goesThe 1/4 cup granulated sugar belongs in the filling, stirred in with the flour paste or once the milk is thickened. The 2 tablespoons powdered sugar are for the cream topping.
- Milk arithmeticA pint is 2 cups. One and a half cups steep with the coconut, the remaining half cup is used to rub the flour smooth. Steeping and straining loses a little liquid, so top up to the original volume if the filling looks stiff.
- CocoanutPeriod coconut is dried shredded or desiccated coconut, unsweetened. If you use sweetened flake, cut the sugar. The recipe strains the coconut out and discards it, using only its flavor; many cooks will prefer to stir half of it back into the finished filling.
- Half a cup of flour is a lotThat ratio to 2 cups of milk gives a very firm, sliceable pastry cream rather than a pourable custard. It is deliberate, since there are no eggs to set the pie, but expect a paste thick enough to mound on a spoon.
- The twenty minutes is not paddingFlour-thickened milk tastes raw and pasty until the starch is fully cooked out. Twenty minutes over simmering water, stirred often, is the hinge of the recipe. Whisk the flour into cold milk first or it will lump on contact with the hot.
- Vegetable gelatineThis means agar-agar, or occasionally Irish moss extract, both sold as substitutes for animal gelatin. Agar will not soften and bloom in cold cream the way gelatin does; it must be boiled in a little water to dissolve and then folded in while the mixture is still warm, since it sets around 100F. A very small quantity, well under a teaspoon of powder, is enough for a cup of cream.
- The crustA fully blind-baked shell, since nothing goes back into the oven. The recipe specifies neither a pan size nor an oven temperature; bake the shell as you normally would until it is dry and coloured at the edges.
- Chilling and yieldA pint of filling suits a standard pie shell; expect roughly six to eight slices. Cool the filling in the shell until cold and set before topping with cream, and keep the finished pie refrigerated; the topping softens within a few hours.
Cream pies thickened with flour rather than eggs were common in American cookery well before they became a talking point for reform cooks, and a book avoiding animal products had a particular reason to print one. Gelatin is made from animal bones and hides, which put ordinary molded and stabilized desserts off the table for vegetarians; the usual substitute was agar-agar, a seaweed extract long used in East Asian kitchens and taken up in Western bacteriology laboratories in the 1880s. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks commonly call it "vegetable gelatine." The coconut here is treated as a flavoring alone, steeped and strained like tea. Whipping cream into peaks in place of a baked egg-white meringue also spared the cook the oven entirely, and the note that "many prefer the little peaks" records a preference about presentation.