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Cocoanut Sauce
1 pint milk 1/2 cup shredded cocoanut 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch 1/4 cup sugar Braid the cornstarch with a little of the cold milk. Steep the cocoanut in the remainder of the milk in the double boiler for one-half hour. Strain out the cocoanut, add the sugar, heat to boiling, and stir in the braided cornstarch with this mixture. When thickened, remove from fire, and add one tablespoon sherry, beating continuously. If grated cocoanut is used the sauce need not be strained.
A simple cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce, infused with coconut and finished with sherry. Nothing about it is difficult, but a few of the terms have drifted.
- "Braid the cornstarch"Most likely a setting error for blend, though the word appears twice. Whisk the 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch into a few tablespoons of the cold milk to make a smooth slurry before it goes anywhere near heat.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups. The whole recipe yields a little under 2 cups of sauce once the coconut is strained out; the book gives no serving count.
- CocoanutModern bagged sweetened flake coconut will make this cloying. Use unsweetened shredded or desiccated coconut, and taste before committing to the full 1/4 cup sugar.
- The steeping stepThirty minutes in a double boiler is an infusion, not a cooking step. Keep the water below a boil so the milk never scalds, then strain and press the coconut to recover the milk it holds.
- ThickeningOnce the slurry goes in, the sauce must come back to a full boil for a minute or so to cook out the raw starch taste and set the thickness. Stir constantly; cornstarch scorches on the bottom of a thin pan.
- The sherryOff the heat, as directed. Added while boiling, the aroma goes up the vent hood and only the sharpness is left.
- ConsistencyCornstarch sauces tighten noticeably as they cool. Judge the finished body slightly thinner than you want it, and thin with a little milk when reheating.
Meatless Cookery, by Maria McIlvaine Gillmore, appeared in 1914, and its stated concern is dietary and medical rather than patriotic. A sweet sauce in such a book is a reminder that these volumes had to cover whole menus, dessert included. The sauce itself is a plain cornstarch custard-substitute of the type that filled nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sauce chapters: cheaper than an egg custard, more forgiving, and endlessly flavored by whatever was steeped in the milk. Coconut, shipped dried and shredded from the tropics, had become an inexpensive pantry staple in American groceries by this period, and shows up in cakes, pies, puddings and sauces of the era with a frequency that surprises modern readers.