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White Cocoanut Pie
The same mixture as the above made very delicate and snow white by letting it become cold and then stirring in instead of yolks 12 or 14 whites of eggs whipped to a froth, and a slight flavoring of rose and orange. Sift powdered sugar over when done Good to fill in paste lined patty pans for gem-tarts, very light baked. Good to use up white of eggs left over.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it depends on the coconut pie custard printed immediately before it, and it is written at bakeshop scale for a cook clearing a bowl of leftover whites.
- Read the preceding recipe first"The same mixture as the above" means the coconut pie custard printed immediately before, with the yolks omitted. Without that page in front of you the quantities here are meaningless.
- The hinge: let the base go coldBeaten whites lose volume quickly in a warm custard, which is why the recipe insists the mixture be cold first. The text says "stirring in"; folding will keep more air, and a deflated batter bakes dense rather than snow white.
- Twelve to fourteen whites is a professional batchThat is roughly 1½ to 1¾ cups of white, enough for several pies or two dozen small tarts. For a single 9-inch pie, scale the whole formula — base included — down by about three-quarters.
- Rose and orange flavoringThese most likely mean rose water and orange flower water, both still sold. They are dilute distillates rather than concentrated extracts, so the quantity needed is larger, but a heavy hand still makes the pie taste soapy; "slight" is the operative word.
- Patty pans and gem pansPatty pans are small shallow tart tins; a gem pan is the cast-iron ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin lined with pastry rounds does the same job.
- "Very light baked"The book gives no temperature; a moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent, baking only until the centers are just set and barely colored. Browning defeats the point of a white pie, and overbaking makes an egg-white custard weep.
- CoconutNineteenth-century "cocoanut" was grated fresh or bought dried and unsweetened. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the filling cloying unless you cut the sugar in the base.
- FinishingThe recipe says to sift the powdered sugar over "when done." If you sugar them while still hot it will dissolve into damp patches, so waiting until they have cooled gives a cleaner finish.
White cakes, white pies and white puddings were a recognizable group in American baking, driven as much by arithmetic as by fashion: a kitchen making custards, yellow cakes or ice cream in quantity ended the day with a crock of egg whites and no way to store them, and cookery books answered with recipes whose purpose was to use them up. The candid last line here — "Good to use up white of eggs left over" — is the plain version of that logic. Rose water and orange flower water are older still, holdovers from eighteenth-century English confectionery that persisted in American baking after vanilla had become the common household flavoring. Coconut was partly a shipping story: grated coconut became a fixture of American pies and cakes as the Caribbean fruit trade and, later, commercially dried and shredded coconut made it something a baker could count on having.