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Cocoanut Pie
Roll out on a lightly floured table a quarter pound of pie paste to a very thin round layer. Lightly butter a deep pie plate, arrange the paste over the plate, neatly pressing it down at the bottom and all around the edge. Trim the edges, then line the inside of the paste with a lightly buttered paper, fill up with dried (already used) beans, egg border all around, and set in oven for fifteen minutes. Remove to a table. Crack four fresh eggs into a bowl, add four ounces sugar, one teaspoon vanilla essence, three-quarters pint of cold milk and a gill cold cream. Mix well with a whisk for two minutes, press through a cheesecloth into a bowl, add three ounces freshly grated cocoanut, and mix a little. Remove beans and paper from the pie plate, wipe inside of plate, pour in preparation, set in oven for twenty minutes. Remove, let cool off, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
A plain baked custard pie with fresh coconut folded through, from a book that assumes a professional kitchen and gives no oven temperature at all. The custard is the whole dish; treat it as a custard, not as a filling.
- The hinge: custard sets by temperature, not by the clockTwenty minutes is not enough for a deep pie holding two cups of dairy and four eggs. Bake until the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass — around 175F at the middle — then pull it. Carried past about 185F the eggs curdle and the pie weeps water under the slice.
- Oven temperaturesBlind-bake the shell at 400-425F for the fifteen minutes indicated, then drop to 325-350F for the custard, which will take 35-45 minutes rather than twenty. A hotter oven puffs and cracks the surface before the middle is cooked.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. Three-quarters of a pint is 1 1/2 cups. Four ounces of sugar is about half a cup plus two tablespoons; three ounces of grated coconut is roughly a cup, loosely packed. A quarter pound of pie paste is scant for a pie plate and must be rolled very thin, with nothing to spare.
- "Egg border all around"Brush the trimmed rim with beaten egg before the blind bake. It sets the edge and helps seal the pastry against the wet filling.
- Blind baking with beansThe buttered paper and re-used dried beans are exactly modern practice; parchment and ceramic weights do the same job. Keep those beans in a jar for the purpose and do not try to cook them afterwards.
- Coconut"Freshly grated cocoanut" means meat cracked from the nut, which is moist and only faintly sweet. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened flaked coconut will make the pie cloying unless you cut the sugar back by a third.
- StrainingPressing the mixture through cheesecloth catches the chalazae and any unbeaten white, which is why the baked custard comes out smooth. Do it before the coconut goes in, as the recipe directs, or you will strain the coconut out.
- Sealing the shellPouring liquid custard into a bare hot shell is the usual cause of a soggy base. A thin brush of beaten egg over the inside of the crust during the last two minutes of blind baking, before filling, is worth the trouble.
- Yield and servingOne pie, six to eight slices. Cool completely before dusting with powdered sugar — on a warm pie the sugar dissolves into a damp film.
Alexander Filippini, long a cook at Delmonico's in New York, wrote for readers who wanted restaurant technique at home, and the method here shows it: weighed pastry, a blind-baked shell, a strained custard, the egg-washed rim. Coconut reached American kitchens in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, when steam shipping and the Caribbean and Central American trade made whole nuts a common city grocery item; commercially shredded and sweetened coconut followed, but a cook of Filippini's training still expected to crack and grate his own, which is why the recipe specifies "freshly grated." The pie itself is simply a baked egg custard with coconut suspended in it — the same family as the custard and cream pies that fill American cookbooks of the period — and if it does sit in a chapter surveying the world's kitchens, that would say more about how exotic the ingredient still felt than about any foreign origin for the dish.