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With Orange Syrup
1 pound of cocoanut (less if the desiccated is used). 1 full pressed quart of bread crumbs. 1 quart of milk. 2 ounces of butter. 2 ounces of sugar. 1 lemon, or sour orange. 4 yolks of eggs.
Make up like preceding kinds; mix in half the cocoanut and bake in two buttered pans. Beat up 6 whites of eggs, add to the firm froth 5 ounces of granulated sugar and the remaining half pound of cocoanut. Spread this cocoanut meringue over the puddings and bake again very slowly with the oven doors open. Cut in squares or diamond shapes and serve with orange syrup. There are numbers of good nondescript articles which we hardly know where to place on an American hotel bill-of fare.
Their merit is proven by that best of tests, a constant appreciative demand. A good dinner gets to looking incomplete when occasionally they are left off. As these articles do not belong anywhere else they are by common consent and usage called "sweet entrees"--which is probably an Americanism--and with the entrees they stand, usually bringing up the rear.
As already hinted, these "sweet entrees" are always evidently welcome and undoubtedly make a difference in the amount of pastry required afterwards. But one of these is enough at a time. Bad taste, poor management and poverty of resource among meats and vegetables are apparent when a bill-of-fare with ten or twelve entrees shows half of them to be of a sweet or farinaceous character. Without the one each day a long line of favorites, such as fruit fritters, charlottes, rice cakes, sweet croquettes, patties, turnovers, rice with apples, pancakes, etc., etc., could never appear at all. This, however, applies only to hotels furnishing full length bills-of-fare. There are greater numbers of houses, both public and private, where any one of these sweet entrees might suffice for the pastry course, and this is particularly the reason for here describing the charlottes which are oftenest used as puddings A fruit charlotte cannot be "thrown together" and be good. Its excellence, when carefully made, and its cheapness, make it worth the attention here given to details.
A coconut bread pudding baked under a coconut meringue, written for a hotel pastry department. The quantities fill two large pans; a single household batch is half of everything.
- The coconut, dividedOne pound total: half goes into the custard base, half into the meringue. If using desiccated (dried, unsweetened) coconut rather than fresh grated, use less; the recipe says only 'less if the desiccated is used' and gives no quantity, fresh coconut meat being roughly half water.
- A pressed quart of crumbsBread crumbs packed into a quart measure comes to roughly 8 to 10 ounces of soft, fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf. Dried commercial crumbs will drink far more milk and give a heavy, pasty pudding.
- Sour orangeA Seville or bitter orange, used for zest and juice. Substitute the zest of one orange with a tablespoon of lemon juice; the point is aromatic oil plus acid, not sweetness.
- "Make up like preceding kinds"The method is not repeated here but refers back to the preceding puddings. For a bread pudding of this type that would ordinarily mean scalding the milk with the butter and sugar, pouring it over the crumbs to swell, then beating in the yolks and zest off the heat so the eggs do not scramble.
- Two ovens, two temperaturesTwo bakings -- the recipe gives no temperatures. Bake the base until set and barely trembling in the centre; the meringue then goes on and bakes "very slowly with the oven doors open" — a very low heat with the door propped ajar, so the coconut colours and the meringue dries rather than weeps or browns hard.
- The hinge: dry the meringue, don't cook it fastSix whites carrying five ounces of sugar and half a pound of coconut is a stiff, heavy meringue. High heat sets the outside, the interior stays wet, and the whole sheet shrinks and leaks syrup when cut. Low and slow is the entire trick.
- Orange syrupNo recipe is given; a simple syrup of sugar and orange juice simmered to a light consistency, sharpened with lemon, will answer. Serve it warm, poured over the squares at the plate.
- YieldAs written, two full pans — realistically 20 to 24 squares. Halved, one 9x13 pan gives about 12.
The essay attached to this recipe — generally attributed, on stylistic grounds, to Jessup Whitehead, who wrote for the men running American hotel kitchens in the 1880s and 90s — is really about menu architecture rather than coconut. The "sweet entr e fritter, a charlotte, a baked pudding cut in diamonds and sauced savoury entr ble d'h astry course proper, and the author is at pains to say one is enough: a bill showing six sweet entr lve advertises a kitchen short on meat and ideas. The dish itself belongs to the great nineteenth-century family of bread puddings, the standing answer to stale bread in any establishment baking its own loaves. Suggestive, if not conclusive, is the coconut. Desiccated coconut is said to have reached American groceries in commercial quantity somewhere towards the end of the century, and pastry cooks who had previously had to crack and grate their own suddenly had a pound of it on the shelf hat spends half a pound on the pudding and half a pound on the meringue without comment.