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Cocoa-Nut Sauce
Two table-spoons butter, cup of sugar, table-spoon of flour, milk of one cocoa-nut, with a small piece grated.
This is a shorthand entry of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how a sweet pudding sauce is built: fat, sugar and flour cooked with a liquid until it thickens. The proportions are sound, but nearly everything about method is left out.
- "Milk of one cocoa-nut" is the water, not canned coconut milkIn nineteenth-century American books the milk of a coconut means the thin sweet liquid drained from inside the shell, usually somewhere between a half cup and a cup from one nut. Canned coconut milk, which is pressed from the grated meat, is far richer and will give a much heavier sauce; if you use it, thin it with water or expect a near-custard.
- Order of workRub the flour into the softened butter with the sugar to make a smooth paste, then whisk in the coconut water gradually. Adding the liquid all at once to melted butter and flour is what produces lumps here, since there is no roux stage.
- Cook it, though the text never says soA tablespoon of raw flour must be cooked out or the sauce tastes pasty. Bring it to a bare simmer over low heat, whisking, and hold it two or three minutes until it thickens and loses the floury smell.
- A cup of sugar is a great dealWith perhaps only half a cup to a cup of liquid from a single nut, this is closer to a syrup than a sauce by modern standards. Around two-thirds of a cup of sugar may suit modern taste better, and cutting it does not affect the thickening, which comes from the flour.
- "A small piece grated"An unspecified quantity; a couple of tablespoons of freshly grated coconut meat is a fair reading, stirred in at the end so it does not soften into nothing. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works if fresh is unavailable, but soak it briefly in the coconut water first.
- Yield and useSomewhere around a cup or a little more. Pudding sauces of this type were generally poured hot over steamed or boiled puddings, plain cake, or baked apples.
- Opening a coconutPierce the soft eye (of the three, usually only one gives way easily) with a screwdriver or skewer and drain the water through a strainer before cracking the shell; it will hold sediment and fibre. Taste the water first, as a coconut past its prime turns sour and will spoil the sauce.
Coconuts travelled well by ship from the Caribbean and kept for some time in a dry pantry, and coconut recipes are common in American cookbooks of the 1880s. The spelling "cocoa-nut" was widespread in nineteenth-century English-language cookbooks and is generally explained as an old confusion with cocoa (cacao), to which the coconut palm is unrelated. Sauces built on butter, sugar and a spoonful of flour were a common dressing for steamed and boiled puddings, quicker than a stirred custard and more forgiving; substituting coconut water for the usual milk or hot water is what gives this one its name.