Cocoanut Pie

History

This coconut pie appears as recipe No. 51 in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking," the cookbook Abby Fisher published in San Francisco in 1881. It is a rich custard-style pie: a fresh coconut is drained of its milk and roasted until the shell loosens, then grated into a creamed base of butter, lard, and powdered white sugar, with beaten egg yolks, the rind and juice of a lemon, stiff-beaten whites, and a little sweet milk folded in, baked in a bottom crust only — her directions make three pies.

Abby Fisher was born in June 1831 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, to Abbie Clifton; genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. She could neither read nor write and dictated the book to friends and associates; in her own preface she explains that "Not being able to read or write myself, and my husband also having been without the advantages of an education... caused me to doubt whether I would be able to present a work," and that the recipes rest on "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years," signing herself "Late of Mobile, Ala.". After settling in the San Francisco Bay Area she cooked for patrons in San Francisco and Oakland and won recognition at regional fairs — a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879 and two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880 — and by the early 1880s ran her own pickle and preserves business. Her book is among the earliest cookbooks by an African-American author, the second known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States after Malinda Russell's "Domestic Cook Book".

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular pie beyond Fisher's own book. It belongs to the body of Southern cooking she mastered over decades and set down, in detail, under her own name.

Ingredients

• 1 whole fresh coconut
• 1 teacup powdered white sugar
• 1 tablespoon butter and lard rubbed together
• 4 whole eggs, yolks
• 1 whole lemon
• 4 whole eggs, whites
• 1/2 teacup sweet milk
• 1/2 pound flour
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 tablespoon lard

Instructions

1. Draw off the milk from the fresh coconut.
2. Place the whole nut in a hot oven and leave it long enough for the shell to pull away cleanly.
3. Grate the coconut meat with the nut juice.
4. Cream together one tablespoon each of butter and lard rubbed together until light and smooth.
5. Add one teacup of powdered white sugar to the creamed fat.
6. Beat the yolks of four eggs until pale, then beat them into the sugar and butter mixture until perfectly light.
7. Grate the rind of one lemon into the mixture, then squeeze the lemon juice into it.
8. Beat the whites of four eggs until light and stiff.
9. Add the beaten whites to the creamed butter and sugar mixture, stirring them well together.
10. Fold in one-half teacup of sweet milk.
11. Mix one-half pound of flour with one tablespoon each of butter and lard using the method detailed in No. 49.
12. Roll out the pastry and fit into pie plates, using crust only at the bottom.
13. Divide the filling among the crusts (this makes three pies).
14. Bake in a quick oven until set.