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Cocoanut Cornstarch
1 cup shredded cocoanut 3 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch Custard sauce 1 pint milk Whites of 3 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix the sugar and cornstarch in a double boiler; add the milk and stir over the fire until it thickens; then add the cocoanut and cook slowly for half an hour, stirring occasionally. Remove from the fire; add the stiffly beaten whites and the vanilla and pour into a wet mold. Turn from the mold when chilled and serve with custard sauce.
A cornstarch blancmange, unmolded and served cold. It is simple, but two things decide whether it sets cleanly and tastes of coconut rather than starch.
- Cook the starch out firstThe half hour of slow cooking after the coconut goes in is not padding — it is what removes the raw, chalky taste of cornstarch and lets the coconut soften and give up flavor. Rushing it gives a pudding that sets but tastes floury.
- Double boiler, and whyCornstarch and milk scorch readily over direct heat, and a scorched blancmange cannot be rescued. If you use a heavy saucepan directly on the burner instead, keep it at the barest simmer and stir constantly.
- The coconut has changed"Shredded cocoanut" of this period might be freshly grated, or the dried desiccated product sold in bulk; sweetened packaged coconut also existed, so the sweetness of the original is uncertain. Standard supermarket sweetened flake will make the pudding cloying; use unsweetened shredded or flaked coconut, or cut the sugar to about 2 tablespoons if sweetened is all you have.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. Whole milk gives the right body — the recipe carries no cream or butter, so skim milk produces something thin and rather bleak.
- Folding in the whitesBeat the whites stiff but not dry, and fold them into the hot base off the heat, quickly and in two additions. The residual heat of the cooked starch partially sets them; if the mixture has cooled and stiffened first, the whites will sit in lumps rather than lightening it.
- Raw white cautionThe whites are never separately cooked, and folding them into a hot base does not reliably pasteurize them. For anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized egg whites.
- A wet moldRinse the mold in cold water and do not dry it. The film of water keeps the pudding from gripping the sides and is the whole trick to turning it out whole. A 1-quart mold, bowl or loaf pan will do.
- Chilling and yieldRefrigerate at least 4 hours, better overnight, before unmolding. It serves 4 to 6. The custard sauce is a separate recipe — a thin stirred custard of milk, the three leftover yolks, sugar and vanilla, cooked to a coating consistency and chilled.
Cornstarch puddings of this kind descend from blancmange, a dish that in medieval Europe was a white mixture of pounded almonds and rice, often with shredded capon or chicken, drifted through gelatin and isinglass in the eighteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth had settled in American kitchens as milk thickened with cornstarch and turned out of a fluted mold. Cornstarch was manufactured commercially in the United States from the 1840s onward, and the starch companies were vigorous promoters of exactly these recipes on their packages. Coconut arrived in the home kitchen on a similar industrial current: desiccated shredded coconut was being packed and sold widely by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which put a tropical flavor within reach of cooks who would never have cracked a whole nut. Beating the whites in separately is what distinguishes this from a plain molded blancmange — it produces a lighter, faintly foamy set.