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Cocoanut Custard Pies
Put two eggs in a basin, beat them with two cupfuls of milk and four ounces of sugar, add one cupful of grated cocoanut and half a teaspoonful of extract of lemon. Put the mixture into a puff paste, and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain baked custard in a pastry shell, written in the shorthand Oscar used for cooks who already knew the drill. Two things need attention: the oven temperature and the fact that the custard is quite loose by modern standards.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F, the lower end of what period books meant by "moderate" (usually 350-375F). Custard set much above that will curdle and weep; dropping to 325F once the filling goes in and accepting a longer bake is a safe approach.
- Four ounces of sugarWeight, not volume — about 1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon of granulated sugar. If your coconut is the sweetened bagged kind, cut this by at least a third.
- Grated cocoanutThis could be fresh coconut cracked and grated at home, unsweetened and moist, though packaged shredded and dried coconut was already widely sold by the 1890s. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest match; sweetened flake changes both the sugar balance and the texture.
- The custard ratioTwo eggs to two cups of milk is thin by current practice and will set softly, closer to a flan than a diner-style coconut custard pie. Three eggs, or two eggs plus a yolk, gives a slice that holds its edge.
- Puff paste under custardPuff pastry goes limp under a wet filling. Blind-bake the shell until dry and pale gold, then pour in the custard while the crust is still hot — that sets the surface and limits sogging. A short crust is the more forgiving choice.
- Extract of lemonHalf a teaspoon is assertive at modern extract strength; the finely grated zest of one lemon reads cleaner.
- Judging donenessPull the pie when the outer two inches are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass — roughly 170-175F at the middle. It carries on cooking out of the oven, and a fully firm centre in the oven means an overcooked, weeping pie.
- YieldEnough for one 9-inch shell or two small ones, which is presumably why the title is plural. Serve at room temperature or cold; it slices badly warm.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's 1896 cookbook, was compiling a working reference rather than a teaching manual, which is why the instructions assume a cook who knows what a puff paste and a moderate oven are. Coconut had been arriving in American ports from the Caribbean through the nineteenth century, and by the 1890s commercially shredded and dried coconut — Philadelphia was a centre of the trade — had turned what was once a laborious ingredient into a pantry staple, which accounts for the sudden abundance of coconut pies, cakes and puddings in cookbooks of the period. The dish itself is simply the old English baked milk custard, a form going back centuries, given an American flavouring; the pastry shell was originally as much a container for baking as a thing to be eaten.