Cocoa-Nut Pie
One pint milk, a cocoa-nut, tea-cup sugar, three eggs; grate cocoanut, mix with the yolks of the eggs and sugar, stir in the milk, filling the pan even full, and bake. Beat whites of eggs to froth, stirring in three table-spoons pulverized sugar, pour over pie and bake to a light brown. If prepared cocoa-nut is used, one heaping tea-cup is required. - Miss N. B. Brown, Washington City.
A single-crust coconut custard with a meringue top. The recipe assumes you know to line a pie plate first, and it assumes a wood range that cooled as it went.
- The crust it never mentionsLine a 9-inch pie plate with unbaked pastry. Blind-baking it for 10 minutes before the filling goes in keeps a wet custard from soaking the bottom.
- A tea-cupRoughly three-quarters of a cup in a book of this period, though the term was never exact. Three-quarters of a cup of sugar to a pint of milk gives a custard that is sweet but not cloying; fresh coconut takes the upper end.
- One cocoa-nutA whole fresh coconut grates out to about 3 to 4 cups, which is a great deal for one pie. Two cups packed is closer to what will fit alongside a pint of milk.
- Prepared cocoa-nutBy the 1880s this generally meant commercially dried, shredded coconut, usually unsweetened. If you use today's sweetened flaked coconut, cut the sugar in the custard by a third.
- OvenStart at 425F for 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 325F for 30 to 40 minutes. A custard baked hot all the way through curdles and weeps.
- Filling the pan even fullCustard swells as it bakes. Leave a quarter-inch below the rim, or it will run over the edge and glue the pie to the plate.
- Judging it doneThe center should still wobble slightly when the pan is nudged; it firms as it cools. A knife inserted an inch from the center comes out clean.
- The meringueSpread it onto the filling while the pie is still hot and seal it to the crust all around, which is what stops it sliding and shrinking and helps keep it from weeping. Ten to twelve minutes at 350F browns it lightly.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Serve at room temperature or chilled; hot custard pie will not cut cleanly.
Coconut reached Southern kitchens as a port commodity rather than a local crop, arriving through New Orleans, Mobile and Charleston from the Caribbean trade, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become a mark of an ambitious dessert -- something a cook grated by hand for a Sunday table or a holiday. Dried, shredded "prepared" coconut was on the market by the 1880s and the recipe's closing note shows the shift in progress: the fresh nut is still the standard, with the packaged product offered as the convenience. The custard-and-meringue construction is the same one behind lemon pies of the period, in which the yolks thicken the filling and the whites, beaten with pulverized sugar, are browned on top so nothing is wasted. The recipe is credited to a named contributor, a common practice in subscription and community cookbooks that circulated household recipes under the authority of the women who actually made them.