No. 3200

Cocoanut Pie

Tarte a la Noix de Coco

Take a deep tin pie plate and line it with foundation paste (No. 135); raise up the edges, pinch all around and leave stand for twenty minutes in a cool place. Put in a vessel four whole eggs, four ounces of sugar and the peel of one lemon; stir well together. Increase the quantity of this mixture with a pint of milk and strain through a fine strainer; spread on the bottom of the pie cautiously into the oven, not to upset any of the liquid, keeping it very plumb, and when in the oven finish filling with more of the preparation, using a dipper for this purpose. Cook forty to fifty minutes.

← No. 3199 Apple Pie Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3201 Cream Pie →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's instructions assume a cook who already knows custard: the whole point here is a shallow egg-and-milk filling that sets without curdling in a raw crust. Two things need translating before you start — the missing coconut and the missing oven temperature.

The coconut is absent from the textThe title promises coconut and the printed method never mentions it. Grated fresh or unsweetened desiccated coconut, roughly 4 ounces, belongs in the strained custard or scattered over the base before the liquid goes in. As written the recipe produces a plain lemon-scented custard pie.
Foundation paste (No. 135)The paste itself is a cross-reference not reproduced here; in Ranhofer it is a plain pie pastry rather than a sweetened pate sucree, but check No. 135 before assuming proportions. Any all-butter pie dough works, and the 20-minute rest in a cool place is a real step, not a flourish, since it helps keep the pinched rim from shrinking.
Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A custard pie of this depth wants 325-350F for the 40 to 50 minutes stated. Hotter and the eggs curdle into a weeping, pitted filling long before the crust colours.
MeasurementsFour ounces of sugar is about half a cup; taking the pint as the US 16 fl oz, the ratio is four eggs to two cups milk, a soft set. The lemon peel should be pared in strips or grated zest only, with no white pith.
Filling in two stagesThe awkward passage about carrying the plate "very plumb" and topping up with a dipper once it is on the oven rack is sound practice with a full liquid custard. Fill it two-thirds, slide it in, then ladle in the rest.
DonenessIgnore the clock in favour of the wobble: the custard is done when the outer two inches are set and the centre still trembles as a single mass. It finishes setting as it cools. An instant-read thermometer in the middle should show about 175F.
Crust protectionRaw pastry under wet custard goes soggy. Blind-baking the shell for 15 minutes and brushing it with a little beaten egg white before filling gives a firmer base than the original method allows.
Yield and serviceA 9-inch plate gives six to eight slices. It belongs in this chapter because it is served cold, not warm — chill at least three hours before cutting.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) collects the working repertoire of Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and this entry pairs a French title, tarte a la noix de coco, with a method that is really a plain baked custard pie of a kind common in nineteenth-century domestic cookbooks. Coconut reached northeastern cities in growing quantity in the second half of the century, first as whole nuts from the Caribbean trade and later, as commercial shredding and drying of coconut developed in the closing decades of the century, as the packaged desiccated coconut that made such pies easier to produce. Ranhofer's numbering system, cross-referencing the pastry to No. 135, suited a professional kitchen, which is one reason so much is left unsaid here -- including, apparently, the coconut itself.