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Frozen Cocoanut Custard or Cocoanut Ice Cream
3 quarts of milk. 18 ounces of sugar. 15 yolks of eggs. 1 pound of desiccated cocoanut--the sugared kind free from oil and rancidity is best.
Make the custard as usual and stir in the cocoanut while it is still warm after straining. Freeze and beat as usual. A little lemon or orange flavoring can be added.
The ordinary ice cream or starch custard can be used the same way as well.
A professional-scale frozen custard base, written for a shop that churned by the gallon. Everything here works in a domestic machine once the quantities come down and the vague instructions are pinned to numbers.
- The hinge: cook the custard to temperature, not by eye"Make the custard as usual" means a stirred custard held over moderate heat until it coats a spoon, roughly 170-175F. Past about 180F the yolks curdle and no amount of straining will bring the texture back.
- Scale it downAs written the base alone runs to about 4 quarts, and the finished ice cream more than that once churning adds air, which is more than most home machines hold. A quarter batch is 3 cups milk, 4 1/2 oz sugar (about 2/3 cup), 4 yolks and 4 oz coconut, which suits a 1 1/2-quart churn.
- 18 ounces of sugarWeight, not volume, as was normal in a bakeshop of the period. It comes to about 2 1/2 cups granulated for the full batch.
- Desiccated cocoanut, the sugared kindThis is the sweetened flaked or shredded coconut sold in bags today. The warning about oil and rancidity is the real point: coconut fat goes stale quickly, so taste it before it goes in, and do not substitute fresh grated coconut here, which behaves differently and spoils fast.
- Why the coconut goes in warmDry coconut is added after straining so it can soften and swell in the hot custard rather than being caught in the sieve. Chill the finished base overnight; the flavor is much stronger the next day.
- "Freeze and beat as usual"Written for a hand-crank or brine freezer, where beating meant scraping the frozen wall into the middle. In a modern machine simply churn until it holds a soft ribbon, then harden in the freezer for two to three hours.
- Starch custardThe alternative base mentioned at the end is a cornstarch-thickened milk pudding, used to stretch or replace expensive yolks. It gives a slightly chewier, less rich result and still takes the coconut the same way.
- FlavoringA little lemon or orange means zest or a few drops of extract, not juice; acid added to a warm dairy base risks curdling. A teaspoon of zest for the full batch is enough to lift the coconut without reading as citrus ice cream.
Desiccated coconut is what makes this recipe possible, and it was a still relatively new convenience when The American Pastry Cook was written: shredded, dried and often sweetened coconut was being packed and advertised commercially in the United States from the 1870s and 1880s onward, which put a tropical flavor within reach of any bakeshop that had previously had to crack and grate the nuts by hand. The recipe's insistence on "the sugared kind free from oil and rancidity" is a tradesman's caution about a product that varied a great deal between suppliers. The frame around it is entirely conventional for the period: a rich boiled custard of milk, sugar and yolks, frozen in a brine-packed churn, with the note that the cheaper starch-thickened base will serve just as well, since a working pastry cook was expected to choose according to what the sale would bear.