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Cocoa-Nut Pudding
Grate one cocoa-nut, saving the milk if perfectly sweet, boil a quart of milk, and pour upon it, adding five eggs beaten with one cup of sugar and one table-spoon butter, add a little salt, two teaspoons vanilla extract, and milk from nut, and bake in a puddingdish lined with rich paste. This is excellent baked like pie with under crust only. A plainer yet good pudding is made by pouring one and one-half pints boiling milk over one pint bread-crumbs and one cup dessicated cocoa-nut mixed; add two table-spoons sugar and nutmeg to flavor; bake. - Mrs. T. B. Johnson, Lagrange, Tenn.
A baked coconut custard in a pastry shell — essentially a coconut pie with a generous egg-to-milk ratio. The hinge is temperature: this is a custard, and a hot oven will curdle it no matter how good the coconut.
- Oven heatBake at 325-350F. The recipe gives no temperature; a custard of this kind wants no more than a moderate oven. Pull it when the edges are set and the center still trembles; residual heat finishes it.
- One cocoa-nutA whole brown coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated meat, about 10-12 oz. Unsweetened frozen or bagged grated coconut substitutes directly. The "dessicated cocoa-nut" of the second version is plain dried unsweetened shredded coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind sold for frosting.
- "Saving the milk if perfectly sweet"That is the water inside the nut, not coconut milk from a can. It spoils quickly once the nut is open, and the caution is the author's own — taste it, and if it is at all sharp or soapy, throw it out. It contributes perhaps half a cup of liquid and the pudding is fine without it.
- TemperingPour the boiled quart of milk over the grated coconut first and let it stand until warm rather than scalding, then beat in the eggs. Adding five beaten eggs to milk straight off the boil will scramble them at the edges.
- The crust"Rich paste" is a short pastry made with a high proportion of butter or lard. Blind-bake it partially before filling; a wet custard poured into raw pastry gives a soggy base.
- ConsistencyA quart of milk with five eggs is a loose custard by modern standards, closer to a spoon pudding than a sliceable pie. Baked in a deep dish it will need 50-70 minutes; in a shallow pie plate, 35-45.
- YieldThe first version fills a deep 9-inch dish and serves 8. The bread-crumb version makes a somewhat smaller pudding and is best served warm with cream.
- The plainer versionOne and one-half pints is 3 cups; one pint of breadcrumbs is a loose dry measure, roughly 3-4 oz of soft crumbs. It contains no eggs, so it sets by starch and swelling alone — expect something like a coconut bread pudding rather than a custard.
Coconut appears constantly in late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and desiccated coconut, sold in packets by the closing decades of the century, cut out the grating and is what makes the second, plainer variant possible. The recipe's structure — coconut from a packet or a grating, thickened with eggs, baked in a lined dish rather than a boiled pudding — and the fact that the author notes it is "excellent baked like pie with under crust only" shows how thin the line between pudding and pie had become in American home cooking by the time The Dixie Cook Book collected contributions like this one from readers across the region.