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December 15
Menu: Boiled Ham; Fried Potatoes; Asparagus on Toast; Bar-Le-Duc and Cheese Sandwiches; Cocoanut Pie; Coffee Cocoanut Pie-1 cup chopped cocoanut, 3 eggs, 1 cup cream, 1 cup milk, 2 tablespoons cornstarch, 4 tablespoons cold water, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 6 tablespoons sugar, and some Crisco pastry. Line 2 pie plates with Crisco pastry. Put milk and cream into saucepan, bring to boiling point, add cornstarch mixed with water. Remove saucepan from fire, stir in Crisco. Let stand until perfectly cold. Beat up yolks of eggs and sugar together, then add cocoanut to them. Add this mixture to milk with stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Divide into prepared pie plates and bake in moderate oven for 30 minutes. Serve hot.
A shallow two-crust-plate custard pie from the calendar section of a promotional cookbook, meant to fill both plates from one batch. A few of the instructions assume 1913 pie plates and 1913 coconut.
- Moderate ovenIn this period "moderate" is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F; the book itself gives no figures. Thirty minutes at that heat will set a shallow custard divided between two plates; a single deeper pie will need longer and should be baked until the centre barely trembles.
- Cocoanut"1 cup chopped cocoanut" most likely means meat pried from a fresh nut and chopped or grated, though packaged coconut was also on sale by then. Unsweetened shredded or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened bagged flake will overwhelm the modest 6 tablespoons of sugar in the filling.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, and the 2 tablespoons stirred into the hot starch base is there for richness only — butter does the same job with more flavour. The pastry is the book's own shortening crust, so any standard single-crust pastry recipe will serve.
- Cook the cornstarchThe recipe removes the pan from the fire almost at once. Let the starch slurry bubble for a full minute before you pull it off, or the finished custard carries a raw, chalky taste.
- Cool it properly"Let stand until perfectly cold" is not optional. Warm base plus beaten yolks equals scrambled egg, and warm base plus beaten whites collapses them before the pie reaches the oven.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites stiff but not dry, and fold rather than stir. They are the only lift in the filling; worked in hard, the pie bakes flat and slightly rubbery.
- Soggy bottomA wet filling goes into raw pastry. Blind-bake the shells 10 minutes at 400F, or set the plates on a preheated baking sheet so the base firms before the custard soaks in.
- Yield and servingTwo pies; the recipe does not give a plate size, but two cups of liquid divided between them makes for shallow fillings. The instruction to serve hot is worth following -- the coconut is fragrant warm and turns waxy once thoroughly chilled.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, was published two years after Crisco itself appeared as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, made from cottonseed oil. Its "Calendar of Dinners" gave a dated menu for every day of the year, each one quietly requiring the product — here even a boiled custard filling gets 2 tablespoons of it, which tells you more about the book's purpose than about the pie. Coconut desserts were fashionable and newly practical in this period: packaged shredded coconut had become a grocery staple in America in the decades before, the Franklin Baker company's entry into the trade being generally traced to the 1890s, though a cook working from a whole nut was still perfectly ordinary. The dish has something of both the English boiled-custard tart and the American cornstarch-thickened cream pie.