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Cuban Conserve
For Cuban cream cake, eclairs aux confitures, bouchees, etc. 1 pound of sugar. 8 ounces of fresh, grated cocoanut. 4 or 5 oranges. 2 lemons. 4 ounces of butter. 8 yolks of eggs.
Grate the yellow rinds of all the fruit and squeeze the juice into the sugar, carefully excluding the bitter seeds. Boil the syrup thus made; add the butter and cocoanut; boil again, then beat in the yolks. Cook five minutes more. Desiccated cocoanut does as well; steep it first in milk enough to barely moisten it.
A rich citrus-and-coconut curd used as a filling rather than a preserve in the shelf-stable sense. The whole thing hinges on how the yolks go in.
- The hinge: the yolksBoiling syrup poured onto or beaten into raw yolks will scramble them if the two meet all at once. Pull the pan from the heat, temper the yolks with a ladleful of the hot mixture, return everything to low heat, and hold it below a simmer for the final five minutes. It should thicken like a curd, never bubble.
- "Conserve" here means fillingDespite the name, this contains butter and egg yolk and is not preserved. Treat it as a pastry cream: refrigerate and use within three or four days, or freeze.
- Ambiguous fruit quantity"4 or 5 oranges" and 2 lemons varies enormously with modern fruit; as written it may give anywhere from about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of combined juice against the pound of sugar. The more juice goes in, the looser the finished mixture, so it is worth measuring and holding some back rather than following the fruit count blindly.
- Fresh coconutEight ounces of grated fresh coconut is somewhat less than the meat of one medium nut. If using the desiccated kind, follow the instruction to steep it first — unsweetened flakes moistened with just enough warm milk to soften, or they will drink the syrup and go stringy.
- Zest before juicingGrate the yellow and orange rinds off all the fruit while it is still whole and firm, and take only the coloured layer. White pith turns the conserve bitter, as do crushed seeds.
- The syrup stageThe sugar and juice want only to dissolve and come to a boil — this is not a candy syrup and does not need a thermometer stage. Cooking it much further reduces it too far and stiffens the finished conserve.
- What the pastry names meanÉclairs aux confitures are choux fingers filled with preserve rather than cream; bouchées are small puff-pastry cases, literally "mouthfuls." Cuban cream cake is presumably a layer cake using this as its filling, though the recipe says no more than that.
- YieldA generous quantity, comfortably more than three cups — enough to fill several cake layers or a large batch of small choux or bouchee shells.
Jessup Whitehead's The American Pastry Cook belongs to the era when Cuban sugar, oranges and coconuts moved through American ports in quantity, and "Cuban" on a bakery card signalled tropical sweetness — coconut, citrus, egg yolks — rather than any particular Havana original. The combination does echo the Spanish-Caribbean tradition of dulces built on egg yolk and syrup, itself generally traced back to Iberian convent sweets, where surplus yolks were cooked down with sugar into thick, keeping pastes. Whitehead was writing for hotel and restaurant pastry departments, which explains the framing: not a dish in its own right but a component, priced out by the pound of sugar and directed at three different finished pastries. The note that desiccated coconut "does as well" marks a moment when commercially dried and shredded coconut had become cheap and reliable enough that a professional could admit to using it in print.