Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Cocoanut Pies
Cocoanut Pies
Pour one cupful of milk into a saucepan, boil and sprinkle in one tablespoonful of corn starch mixed with two tablespoonfuls of sugar; when these are incorporated, add a lump of butter, one pinch of salt and two ounces of grated cocoanut. Pour the mixture in a basin, let it cool, add the whites of four eggs beaten to a froth, put the mixture into pans lined with puff paste, and bake until done.
A thin cornstarch-bound coconut custard lightened with beaten whites and baked in pastry shells. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a pie crust behaves, so the gaps are in quantities, temperature and yield.
- Fold the whites in last, and gentlyThe whites are the only lift in this filling, and the base must be cool before they go in or they will deflate and cook into strings. Beat them to a soft froth rather than stiff peaks so they fold cleanly into a fairly thick cornstarch base.
- Cornstarch into boiling milkSprinkling dry starch into boiling milk is asking for lumps. Slake the tablespoon of cornstarch and two tablespoons of sugar with a few spoonfuls of the cold milk first, then whisk that into the boiling remainder and cook a minute until it thickens and loses its raw taste.
- "Cocoanut"Coconut. It could be grated fresh from the shell, which is moist and mildly sweet, though prepared desiccated coconut was also on sale by this date. Two ounces is roughly two-thirds of a cup grated fresh, or a little under a cup of modern unsweetened desiccated shred. Sweetened bagged flake will make the filling cloying against only two tablespoons of sugar.
- "A lump of butter"About one tablespoon. Its job is richness and gloss, not structure, so precision hardly matters.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature. Around 375F is a reasonable modern setting: hot enough to set the paste before the filling weeps, gentle enough that the whites do not souffle up and collapse. "Until done" means the filling is set at the edges with a faint wobble at the centre, roughly 25 to 30 minutes for small pans.
- Pans lined with puff pasteThe plural suggests small tartlet or patty pans rather than one deep pie, though it could equally mean two shallow plates. Line them, chill the pastry firm, and prick or weight the bases briefly before filling if you want a crisp bottom under a wet custard.
- YieldOne cup of milk should fill about six to eight small tarts three inches across, or one shallow eight-inch pie. It is a modest quantity of filling for the amount of pastry.
- FlavouringNothing is added but salt. A half teaspoon of vanilla or a scrape of lemon zest in the cooled base is in keeping with the period and does the coconut no harm.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as maitre d'hotel when it opened in 1893 and published his cook book in 1896; it is less a set of Waldorf secrets than a very large working reference, and this entry is written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, where a pastry cook is expected to supply the oven setting and the pan size himself. Coconut in nineteenth-century America arrived whole from the Caribbean and had to be cracked and grated by hand, which made it a treat rather than a staple, though by the closing decades of the century commercially prepared desiccated coconut was on grocers' shelves and coconut pies, cakes and puddings spread quickly through American recipe books. The construction here is older than the ingredient: a milk base thickened with starch, enriched with butter and raised with beaten whites is the same method behind a great many Victorian cheesecakes and cabinet puddings, with the coconut simply standing in for almond or lemon.