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Coconut Pudding
1/2 cup bread-crums 1/2 cup coconut 2 cups milk 1 egg 3 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter Soak the bread and coconut in the milk until soft, then mash and add the sugar, salt and melted fat. Beat the white and yolk of the egg separately; add the yolk to the mixture, then fold in the white. Pour into a greased baking-dish, set in a pan of hot water and bake in a moderate oven about thirty minutes.
A thrifty bread-and-milk custard stretched with coconut, baked gently in a water bath. Almost everything hinges on keeping the heat low and even.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven here is around 325-350F. The water bath is not optional: it keeps the outside of the custard from setting hard and weeping before the center is done.
- The coconutThe recipe does not specify, but dried shredded coconut, unsweetened loose or the moist packaged sort, is the likely intent. Use unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut; if all you have is the sweetened bagged kind, cut the sugar to two tablespoons.
- Bread-crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old white bread, not dry commercial crumbs, which will drink the milk and go pasty. Half a cup of soft crumbs is roughly one slice.
- "Melted fat"The ingredient list says butter, the method says fat; they are the same tablespoon. Melt it and let it cool slightly before adding, or it will start to set the yolk.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon in a two-cup pudding reads high to modern palates. A quarter teaspoon is closer to current expectations, especially if the coconut is already sweetened.
- Judging donenessThirty minutes is a starting point; one egg to two cups of milk sets slowly. Look for edges that are firm and a center that still wobbles as one piece, and pull it before a knife comes out entirely dry.
- Dish and yieldA one-quart baking dish is right, or four six-ounce ramekins baked closer to 25 minutes. It serves four modestly, and is better warm than hot.
This belongs to the long line of English bread puddings that crossed into American home cooking as a way of using stale loaf ends. Shredded coconut became a more ordinary pantry item in American kitchens through the later nineteenth century, once packers began drying and bagging it for the grocery trade, and it was widely used to make a plain milk pudding taste like a treat. The Delineator was a Butterick magazine with a substantial domestic department, and recipes like this one -- one egg, a cup of odds and ends, a water bath -- suit a cook feeding a family on a fixed weekly sum.