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Cocoanut Cream Pie
1/3 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla cup sugar ¼ teaspoon salt 1½ cups scalded milk 2 tablespoons cornstarch Yolks 3 eggs 1 tablespoon butter cup shredded cocoanut teaspoon vanilla Add the sugar, cornstarch and salt to the egg yolks. Pour the scalded milk into this, return to double boiler, stir and cook until thickened. Add the butter, cocoanut and vanilla. Pour into a pie tin lined with pastry. Bake in a hot oven 450° F. until the crust is set, then reduce the temperature to 325° F. The pie may be covered with meringue.
A stirred custard finished in the oven rather than a true cream pie chilled in a baked shell. The printed text has lost several of its fractions, so read the quantities with care.
- Missing fractionsThe text reads "cup sugar," "cup shredded cocoanut" and "teaspoon vanilla" — the fraction marks are absent in those three cases. For 1½ cups of milk and three yolks, ½ to ⅔ cup sugar, ½ to ¾ cup coconut and ½ to 1 teaspoon vanilla are consistent with period cream pies. The salt is ¼ teaspoon, which suits a pie of this size.
- Temper, don't scrambleThe instruction to pour scalded milk into the sugar-cornstarch-yolk mixture works only if the milk goes in slowly with constant whisking. Added all at once it will set the yolks in threads before the starch has a chance to thicken.
- Cook the starch outIn the double boiler, keep stirring until the custard coats a spoon heavily and no raw-starch taste remains — roughly 8 to 12 minutes over simmering water. Cornstarch needs to reach near boiling to lose its chalkiness, which a double boiler achieves slowly but reliably.
- The two-stage oven450°F sets the bottom crust fast before the wet filling can soak in; 325°F then finishes the custard without curdling it. The original gives no times: figure roughly 10 minutes hot, then 25 to 30 minutes at the lower heat, until the centre barely trembles.
- Consider blind bakingThe hot-then-slow method is a standard workaround for a soggy base. A shell blind-baked at 400°F and filled with the hot custard, then given only a short bake to set the meringue, gives a crisper crust — a change in method, not in the recipe.
- Shredded cocoanutPeriod shredded coconut was usually unsweetened and drier than most bagged sweetened flake sold now. If using sweetened, pull the sugar back toward the low end of the range.
- MeringueIf you add the optional meringue, whip three whites with about 6 tablespoons sugar, spread it so it seals to the crust edge all round, and brown at 350°F for 12 to 15 minutes. Sealing the edge helps stop the meringue shrinking away from the crust.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only "a pie tin"; with 1½ cups of milk this is a modest filling, better suited to an 8-inch shell than a 9-inch. Cool completely before cutting; a warm cornstarch custard slumps.
Coconut arrived in American kitchens in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, when improved shipping and, later, commercially shredded and packaged coconut made it a pantry staple rather than a whole nut to be cracked and grated by hand. The spelling "cocoanut," standard in American cookbooks well into the 1920s, reflects an old confusion with cocoa and gradually fell out of use. A pie like this belongs to the large family of cornstarch-thickened cream pies that flourished once cheap cornstarch was widely available: they stretched a small number of eggs much further than a straight custard could, and the same base, varied with chocolate, banana or lemon, turns up again and again in the pie chapters of community and company cookbooks of the period. The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders — one of many corporate cookbooks that carried practical, standardized recipes into American homes at a time when insurers took an active interest in domestic nutrition.