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Cocoanut Custard
1½ cups milk Sugar to taste 2 eggs 1 cup grated cocoanut Boil the milk; sweeten to taste and cool. Beat the eggs separately and then together; add them to the cocoanut and combine with the milk. Bake in a crust like custard pie.
A custard pie filling written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew how custard pie behaves. Two things are unstated: the oven and the size of the dish.
- The hinge: cool the milkThe instruction to boil then cool the milk is not decorative. Adding hot milk directly to beaten eggs sets them into threads that will not smooth out, and no amount of baking recovers the texture. Scald, then let it come down to lukewarm before combining.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature at all, not even a qualitative one. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 325F for 25 to 35 minutes. A steady 350F throughout also works but gives a slightly softer crust.
- DonenessPull it when the outer inch is set and the center still shakes as a single mass; it finishes firming as it cools. An instant-read thermometer in the center should show 170 to 175F. Baked until fully firm in the oven, the custard weeps.
- "Sugar to taste"For this quantity of milk, 1/3 to 1/2 cup granulated sugar is a workable range. Use the lower end if you are working with sweetened coconut.
- Grated cocoanutThis most likely means a whole brown coconut, cracked and grated on a hand grater, unsweetened and quite moist, though packaged shredded coconut was also sold by the later nineteenth century. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened bagged flake is drier and much sweeter, so cut the sugar accordingly.
- Beating the eggs separatelyWhites and yolks are beaten apart, then together. This lightens the custard slightly rather than aerating it like a cake batter, and it is worth doing, but do not whip the whites to peaks.
- Vessel and yieldOne and a half cups of milk with two eggs fills a shallow 8-inch pie shell. It will look thin in a deep 9-inch dish. Serves six modest slices.
- The crustA wet filling in raw pastry goes soggy. Blind-bake the shell until dry and just colored, then add the custard while the shell is still warm.
The spelling "cocoanut" was common in English-language cookbooks into the early twentieth century, and its persistence here is a rough marker of the book's vintage. Coconut reached American home kitchens as whole nuts carried north by the Caribbean and Central American fruit trade, and for much of the nineteenth century a cook who wanted grated coconut generally had to crack, peel and grate one herself, which is why recipes of the era so often specify "grated". Commercially shredded and sweetened coconut, sold in packages, made the ingredient a pantry staple rather than an occasion, and coconut custard pie settled in alongside plain custard and buttermilk pie as a familiar American dessert.