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Cocoanut Conserve
8 ounces of grated cocoanut. 1/2 cupful of milk, or water. 8 ounces of sugar. 2 ounces of butter. Whites of four eggs. Thin pared yellow rind of 1/2 an orange.
Mince the orange peel and boil it with the sugar and milk. Stir in the cocoanut, the butter, and the beaten whites last. Take the mixture off when it thickens.
The two preceding kinds give a yellow and a white nut cream or conserve, very useful and ornamental for spreading between layers of snow cake. Pistachios and hickory nuts can be substituted for either of the other kinds. Can be thinned with milk if too firm when cold.
It is seldom necessary to keep any such compounds as these in hotel work for any length of time. The quantities prescribed are for the usual daily requirements of 50 persons. It should be remembered, however, that sunlight turns butter rancid, and anything containing it should be kept dark in covered jars.
A cooked coconut cake filling from a professional pastry manual, written for a hotel line rather than a home kitchen. It behaves like a stirred custard thickened with sugar and egg white, and the same rules apply.
- The hinge: keep the whites from scramblingThe beaten whites go in last and the mixture is taken off as soon as it thickens, so stir constantly and keep the pan below a hard boil. If the syrup is boiling fiercely when they hit it, the mixture can curdle into sweet coconut scrambled egg.
- Weights and measures8 oz grated coconut is about 2 3/4 cups loosely packed dried unsweetened; 8 oz sugar is about 1 1/8 cups; 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons. The cupful of milk is a standard 8 oz cup, so 1/2 cupful is 4 oz.
- "Cocoanut," gratedThe recipe calls simply for grated coconut. Freshly grated, or unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut, will all serve; sweetened flaked coconut will make the conserve cloying, so reduce the sugar if you use it.
- Thin-pared rindTake only the coloured zest of the half orange with a peeler, no white pith, then mince it fine. Boiled with the syrup it perfumes the whole filling; pith boiled in it turns bitter.
- How thick is thickCook only until the mixture mounds on the spoon and a track drawn through it holds for a second or two, then pull it off the heat immediately. It firms considerably as it cools, which is why the recipe offers milk to loosen it again.
- YieldThe recipe states that the quantities are "for the usual daily requirements of 50 persons," that is, a day's spreading between cake layers in a hotel dining room rather than fifty portions of the conserve itself.
- "The two preceding kinds"The version here uses whites only; the recipe refers back to two earlier ones said to give a yellow and a white nut cream, the yellow presumably made with yolks. A pastry cook working through separated eggs would have had an obvious use for both, though the book does not say so.
- StorageThis is a cooked egg-and-dairy preparation with no preservative but sugar. Refrigerate it covered and use within two or three days; the author's advice about keeping butter out of sunlight belongs to a kitchen with an icebox at best.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the quantities are pegged to a day's service for fifty and why the closing note worries about jars going rancid in the light. Coconut, spelled "cocoanut" throughout this period, had become a routine bakeshop ingredient in American cities once steam shipping and commercial desiccating plants made the nuts cheap and reliable, and it turns up in the layer cakes and coconut pies of the 1880s and 1890s. "Snow cake" is a white cake raised with beaten egg whites, so the whites left over from a yolk-based yellow conserve would have had an obvious use, though the book does not spell the arrangement out. The suggestion that pistachios or hickory nuts can stand in for the coconut may reflect the same economy, hickory being an inexpensive native nut.