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Baked Cocoanut Custard
2 quarts of milk. 8 ounces of sugar. 6 ounces of corn starch. Butter size of a guinea egg--1 oz. 8 eggs. 8 ounces of desiccated cocoanut. Boil the milk with the sugar in it. Mix the starch in a bowl with a little cold milk, add it to the milk on the fire and take off immediately without waiting for it to boil again. Beat in the butter, then the eggs, about half the cocoanut, and pour the custard into two buttered pans where it will be only an inch deep. Sprinkle the rest of the cocoanut over the tops, and a little sugar over that and bake 10 or 15 minutes till set and of a yellow color on top. Must be cold to serve. May have a spoonful of sweetened cream in the saucers.
And when the ice supply is exhausted and the delicious ice creams and water ices which the fifteen families have learned to prize above all the other contrivances for dessert suddenly fail to appear, why must fifteen persons at least worry over the situation and spend the days in unquietness conjuring up cold dishes that shall almost fill the ices places, when one person making a trade of such knowledge could satisfy them all without effort?
A starch-bound baked custard scaled for a boarding house or hotel dining room: the whole batch fills two shallow pans and will serve roughly sixteen. The hinge is temperature control when the eggs go in.
- Temper the eggsThe starch mixture is still very hot when the eggs go in, and the recipe gives no instruction to beat them separately first. Beat the eggs in a bowl, stir a ladle or two of the hot mixture into them, then return that to the pot off the heat, or you risk sweet scrambled egg suspended in cornstarch.
- Take the cornstarch off the fire promptlyThe instruction not to let it return to a boil looks deliberate. Cornstarch reaches its full thickening close to boiling point, and prolonged hard boiling with stirring can break the gel down again, so the custard could set less firmly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book offers no oven term to convert. The mixture is already cooked and thickened, so the bake only sets the eggs and colours the coconut on top; a fairly hot oven, somewhere in the region of 375-400F, is a reasonable modern guess for the stated 10 to 15 minutes at a depth of one inch.
- Guinea eggThe book answers itself: one ounce, that is two tablespoons of butter. Guinea fowl eggs are smaller than hens' eggs, which is the whole point of the comparison.
- Desiccated cocoanutThis is unsweetened dried shredded coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind sold for cake decorating. Sweetened coconut will make the dish cloying and will scorch on top before the custard sets; if it is all you have, cut the sugar.
- PansThe recipe fixes the depth, not the dimensions: use two pans small enough that this quantity stands a full inch deep. Depth matters more than exact dimensions, since a deeper pan needs a slower, longer bake and may weep.
- ServingIt must be thoroughly cold, which means several hours in the refrigerator, and it is cut in squares from the pan rather than turned out. The spoonful of sweetened cream in the saucer is worth doing.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the professional trade -- hotel, restaurant and boarding-house cooks feeding fixed numbers at fixed prices -- which explains both the two-quart scale and the digression tacked onto the end, a small sermon on the value of hiring someone who knows how to make a cold dessert when the ice runs out. Before mechanical refrigeration was general, ice was bought in and could simply be gone, and a pastry cook's usefulness lay partly in having a repertoire of chilled dishes that needed no freezing at all. This one leans on desiccated coconut, which by the end of the century was becoming a cheap, shelf-stable store-cupboard item as commercial drying and shredding spread, and on cornstarch, which lets a custard set firm enough to cut in squares without the long, careful water-bath bake that an egg-only custard demands. The result is closer to a cut-and-serve blancmange than to a spoon custard, and it was cheap for the numbers it fed.