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Cocoanut Pudding
One-half cup of cocoanut; one-half cup of bread crumbs; one pint of milk; one egg; one tablespoon of butter; two tablespoons of sugar; one-half teaspoon of salt. Soak the bread and cocoanut in the milk for three hours; then mash the bread fine, and add the sugar, salt and melted butter. Beat the white and yolk of the egg separately, and add first the yolk and then the white, stirring well. Bake one-half hour.
A plain baked bread-and-milk custard flavored with coconut, of the sort that filled out a weeknight supper. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is stated and no oven term is given; a moderate oven, about 350F, suits it. Half an hour at that heat should do for a shallow dish of about a quart; set the dish in a pan of hot water if you want the edges to stay tender.
- "Cocoanut"The period spelling for coconut. In 1911 this meant either freshly grated meat or the dried shredded coconut sold in packets — use unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut, since modern sweetened flake will throw the sugar balance off.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from stale white bread, not dried fine crumbs and certainly not panko. Dry commercial crumbs absorb differently and give a pasty set; a half cup of soft crumbs is roughly one thick slice.
- The soaking is the recipeThree hours in the milk is what softens the coconut and lets the crumbs break down into a custard rather than sitting as lumps. Refrigerate while it soaks, and don't cut the time short if you can help it.
- Adding the eggYolk first, then the beaten white, which the recipe says to stir in well. The white gives a slight lift; working it in too vigorously will knock that out and give a denser, flatter pudding.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of sugar to a pint of milk is barely sweet by current taste. A pudding this plain takes well to a sweet sauce, jam or stewed fruit alongside.
- Doneness and yieldIt is set when a knife inserted an inch from the center comes out clean and the middle still trembles slightly; it firms as it cools. Serves four small portions.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern-and-magazine publisher rather than a chef, and its pudding chapter is full of simple bread-and-milk custards distinguished largely by a flavoring — lemon, chocolate, raisins, coconut. The old spelling "cocoanut" persisted in American cookbooks into the 1920s, apparently from an association with cocoa. Shredded coconut, packaged dry and shelf-stable, had become cheap and widely distributed in the United States by the turn of the century, which put a tropical ingredient into the hands of cooks who would never see a whole nut. What the recipe really is, underneath, is a bread pudding: a thrift dish for stale bread, dressed up just enough to read as a dessert.