Home › Pastry, Pies and Tarts › Cocoanut Pie
Cocoanut Pie
Cream a half cupful of butter with two teacupfuls of powdered sugar, and beat in a half grated cocoanut. Fold in lightly the stiffened whites of six eggs, turn into a deep pie dish, lined with puff paste, and bake in a quick oven. Eat cold with powdered sugar and cream.
A meringue-rich coconut filling with no milk, flour or yolks — closer to a soft macaroon baked in a pastry shell than to the custard coconut pie most cooks expect. The proportions are generous with sugar even by period standards.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this era is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so two teacupfuls of powdered sugar is roughly 1 to 1½ cups. Powdered sugar here means finely milled sugar rather than modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar; caster sugar is the closer match.
- Half a grated cocoanutOne medium coconut yields about 3 to 4 cups of loosely packed fresh gratings, so half gives roughly 1½ to 2 cups. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works, but use about 1 cup and expect a drier filling, since dried coconut lacks the moisture of fresh. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the pie cloying against this much sugar.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400–450F. That is right for setting puff paste but will scorch a sugar-and-egg-white filling if held there. Start hot for about 10 minutes to lift the pastry, then drop to 350F until the centre is set and barely coloured, roughly 25 to 30 minutes more.
- The hingeFold the whites in as instructed and no further. This filling has no starch or yolk to hold it, so any deflation of the whites leaves a dense, weeping layer instead of the light one intended.
- Puff paste in a deep dishPuff pastry slumps in a deep tin. Blind-bake the shell with weights until it is dry and set before filling, or use shortcrust.
- DonenessThe filling should be set to a gentle wobble at the centre and just golden at the edges. It will firm considerably as it cools, and the recipe is explicit that it is eaten cold.
- YieldOne deep 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Cream poured over each slice is part of the dish, not a garnish — it offsets the sweetness of the filling.
"Cocoanut" was a common English spelling well into the twentieth century, generally attributed to confusion with cocoa. Whole coconuts became a familiar grocery item in American and British cities in the second half of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks from the 1870s onward are full of coconut cakes, puddings, custards and pies that assume the cook will crack and grate the nut herself; commercially desiccated coconut only became widely available towards the end of the century. This version, built on stiffly beaten whites rather than milk and yolks, belongs to the same family as coconut macaroons and the meringue-topped pies that later became more familiar, and may have served to use up whites left after yolks had gone into a custard or a rich cake.