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Cream Cocoa-Nut Pudding
941. Grate a large cocoa-nut fine. Stir together a quarter of a pound of butter, and a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar till quite light. Beat six eggs, and mix them gradually with one pint of cream, or cream and milk mixed; stir all together well. Put the mixture into a dish and bake it. Serve either hot or cold with sifted sugar: this pudding may be baked in puff paste.
A baked coconut custard with no oven temperature, no timing and no pan size given — all of which the period cook was expected to supply. The proportions are sound; treat it as a custard and it behaves.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyThis is a custard, so a moderate oven of 325–350F is the ceiling. Higher and the eggs curdle and weep before the centre sets; a roasting tin of hot water around the dish is the cheapest insurance.
- Timing and donenessIn a buttered 8–9 inch dish, reckon 45–60 minutes. It is done when the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as one piece; the custard should read about 175F at the middle.
- The coconutA large coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups (about 300 g) of freshly grated flesh, brown skin pared off first. Desiccated coconut is drier - use about 2 cups and expect a firmer, less milky pudding; if you can only get the sweetened flaked kind, cut the sugar back.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken or pounded down as needed. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct replacement; a quarter pound is about 115 g, half a cup.
- Creaming butter and sugar"Till quite light" means pale and aerated, three or four minutes with a mixer. The butter must be soft to start or it will stay in grains and later float as a greasy layer on top.
- Adding the eggsBeat the six eggs and the pint of cream together first, then add that liquid to the creamed butter in a slow stream. Dumping it in at once will split the mixture — it will still bake, but the texture suffers.
- Cream or cream and milkIf the pint is imperial it is 20 fl oz, about 2½ US cups; a US pint is 16 fl oz. All cream gives a rich, dense set; half cream and half whole milk is lighter, and the recipe itself allows either.
- The puff paste optionIf lining the dish with pastry, blind-bake the shell first. Wet custard poured into raw puff paste gives a sodden base every time.
- YieldServes eight generously. Sifted sugar over the top just before serving, as directed — do it earlier and it dissolves into the surface.
Coconut arrived in British kitchens as a colonial import and was, through the nineteenth century, a luxury handled whole: cracked, drained and grated at home, since sweetened flaked coconut in packets was not yet a shop staple. Recipes of this kind sit in the long line of English baked cream puddings — essentially a rich custard bulked with an aromatic, in the same family as the almond and ratafia puddings that preceded them — with the coconut standing in for ground almonds. The alternative of baking it in puff paste points back to an older habit still, where nearly every sweet pudding could be turned into a tart by the simple expedient of putting pastry underneath it.