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Cocoanut Pie (III)
Mrs. Saulter.
One and one-half pints of milk, six eggs, one cocoanut, three cups of sugar, one-half cup of butter; mix sugar and butter, then the eggs, then the cocoanut, and lastly the milk.
This is a filling, not a whole pie: Mrs. Saulter assumes you already have pastry in the tins and a hot oven going. The quantities make enough for two or three nine-inch pies, so read it as a batch recipe rather than one dessert.
- The measurementsOne and a half pints of milk is three cups. "One cocoanut" means one whole nut, cracked and grated, which yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of fresh shredded meat — about 8 oz of dried unsweetened shred, soaked in a little of the milk, stands in for it.
- Three cups of sugarThat is far sweeter than modern custard practice and clearly sized for several pies. Even spread across three shells it will taste sweet; halving it produces something closer to what a contemporary palate expects, especially if you use sweetened packaged coconut.
- Oven heatA coconut custard wants a moderate oven, 325-350F. Higher heat curdles the egg and weeps water into the crust.
- The hinge: do not overbakeSix eggs in three cups of milk sets firmly. Pull the pies when the outer inch is set and the center still trembles — carryover heat finishes it. Baked until the middle is solid, the custard splits and goes grainy.
- Blind-bake the shellThe original takes the crust for granted. Since the filling is liquid and the bake is gentle, partially bake the pastry first, 400F for about 15 minutes with weights, or the bottom stays raw.
- Order of mixingCreaming the sugar and butter, then beating in the eggs, is worth following: it should help keep the butter in suspension so it does not float to the top as a greasy skin. Add the milk last and slowly, as written.
- Fresh coconutIf you crack a whole nut, reserve the water inside and use it as part of the liquid. Grated fresh coconut is far moister than dried and will not thicken the custard the way soaked desiccated shred does.
- ServingCool completely before cutting; a warm egg custard slices badly. These keep two days refrigerated, no longer.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks are thick with coconut recipes because the fruit arrived in quantity on the Caribbean trade routes and, unlike most tropical produce, it travelled well — a whole nut in its husk keeps for weeks. Commercially shredded and dried coconut, sold in packets from the later part of the century, is what eventually shrank such recipes to single-pie size. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled by ladies of Toronto in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and drew heavily on the earlier Chicago Home Cook Book, whose beneficiary was not a hospital; its recipes read as they would have been passed between neighbours: ingredients and order of operations, with the oven, the crust and the cooling left to the cook's judgement. That this is the third coconut pie in the collection says something about how fashionable the ingredient was.