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Coconut Pudding
½ cup bread-crums
3 tablespoons sugar
½ cup coconut
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups milk
1 tablespoon butter
1 egg
Soak the bread and coconut in the milk until soft, then mash and add the sugar, salt and melted fat. Beat the white and yolk of the egg separately; add the yolk to the mixture, then fold in the white. Pour into a greased baking-dish, set in a pan of hot water and bake in a moderate oven about thirty minutes.
A thrifty baked custard stretched with bread, of the sort that filled out a Sunday supper. It comes together in one bowl and asks only that you not overbake it.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" in period usage is somewhere around 325-350F. The water bath keeps the custard below the oven temperature, which is the point of it — bare, direct heat would risk curdling the egg before the centre set.
- The hinge: pull it earlyThirty minutes is right for a shallow dish, but judge by the centre: it should still wobble slightly when nudged, roughly 170-175F on a thermometer. Carryover heat finishes it. Baked until firm all through, it weeps and turns grainy.
- Which coconutThis means dried shredded coconut, generally drier than most bags sold today. If yours is the sweetened, moist kind, cut the sugar to 2 tablespoons.
- Bread-crumbsCrumbs from a plain white loaf. The instruction to soak them until soft suggests stale or dried crumbs rather than soft fresh ones; either will work, but soak accordingly. Half a cup, lightly packed.
- "Melted fat"The tablespoon of butter from the ingredient list. Some cooks would have substituted drippings or shortening.
- Soaking timeGive it 20 to 30 minutes. Coconut in particular needs it — undersoaked shreds stay tough and squeak against the custard.
- The beaten whiteFold it in with a light hand and bake at once. It lifts the pudding a little and keeps the crumb from settling into a dense layer at the bottom.
- Water bath and dishA 1-quart dish; pour hot water to come halfway up the sides. Line the outer pan with a folded towel if you want to be certain the bottom does not scorch.
- YieldFour modest servings. Good warm, and better cold the next day with cream or a spoonful of jam.
Bread-and-milk puddings of this kind belong to an old branch of the English pudding family — a way of turning stale loaf ends, an egg and whatever milk was on hand into a hot sweet dish. The coconut is the modern touch: by the time Butterick issued this collection, desiccated coconut was a cheap, shelf-stable grocery staple, shipped in quantity from Ceylon and the Caribbean and heavily promoted by American packers, and it turned up in cakes, pies, custards and candies with a suddenness that suggests a recipe belonging roughly to the decades either side of 1900. Butterick was a pattern company, and its household book was aimed at the same readership as its dress patterns — women running a house on a set budget — which explains the shape of this recipe: one egg, no cream, and a half cup of bread doing the work that a richer kitchen would have given to more eggs.