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Cocoanut Pudding
Break into a bowl three eggs (keeping yolks and whites together), two ounces fine sugar and one teaspoon vanilla essence. Sharply whisk for two minutes, then pour in three gills cold milk and one gill cream; whisk again for two minutes, add two ounces shredded cocoanut, lightly mix for a minute, then pour the preparation into a quart pudding mould. Place in a small saucepan with hot water up to one-half the height of the mould. Set in a slow oven for forty minutes. Remove, unmould on a dish and pour the following sauce over: Place two ounces granulated sugar in a very small saucepan with one and a half gills cold water; boil for two minutes; remove from the fire; add one teaspoon kirsch and one teaspoon maraschino. Lightly mix and use.
A baked coconut custard turned out of its mould and glossed with a kirsch-and-maraschino syrup. The whole thing hangs on gentle heat: the water bath and a genuinely slow oven are what keep it sliceable rather than curdled.
- Gills to cupsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of milk is 1½ cups and one gill of cream is ½ cup. The sauce takes 1½ gills of water, or ¾ cup.
- "Slow oven"Conventionally somewhere around 300-325F; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Anything hotter will bubble the custard and leave it weeping and pitted, and it will not unmould cleanly.
- The water bath is the recipeThe mould sits in a pan with hot water halfway up its side. Use water that is already hot when it goes in, and top it up if the level drops; dry heat on the sides of the mould is what curdles a custard.
- TimingForty minutes assumes a quart mould in a well-behaved oven. Start checking at 40 minutes and expect up to an hour: the custard is done when the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass, not in ripples. A knife an inch from the centre should come out clean.
- CoconutTwo ounces of shredded coconut is roughly three-quarters of a cup, loosely packed. Use unsweetened; modern sweetened flake will push the pudding well past the two ounces of sugar the recipe intends.
- Weighed sugarTwo ounces of fine sugar is about ¼ cup. "Fine sugar" here is caster sugar — ordinary granulated dissolves fine given the whisking.
- UnmouldingLet the pudding stand 10 to 15 minutes out of the water bath before turning it out, and run a thin knife round the edge first. Fully chilled it releases even more cleanly, though the original clearly means it warm.
- The sauceTwo ounces sugar to ¾ cup water boiled two minutes is a thin syrup, not a glaze; it soaks in rather than coats. The kirsch and maraschino go in off the heat so the spirit is not driven off.
- YieldA quart mould serves four to six.
Coconut reached American and European kitchens in quantity in the later nineteenth century, once desiccated and shredded coconut could be shipped and shelved rather than hacked from a fresh nut, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are full of it — coconut cakes, pies, custards and macaroons. What is telling here is the sauce: kirsch and maraschino, two liqueurs of the professional French restaurant kitchen, poured over a tropical pudding. It is the gesture of a kitchen where a domestic milk custard is finished with whatever the still-room shelf held. The spelling "cocoanut" was widely used in the nineteenth century, alongside competing forms, and only gradually gave way to "coconut", the older form reflecting a long-standing confusion with cocoa.