Home › Beverages, Ices and Candies › Cocoanut Candy
Cocoanut Candy
Two cupfuls of white sugar, one-fourth cupful of water: boil; put the pan in a larger pan of water, and stir until cool; when it begins to get somewhat stiff and cool enough, stir in the grated cocoanut, and stir until cold. Cut into cakes. The meats of any nuts, chopped or grated, may be used. The name of the candy coming from the nuts.
XII. Candied Fruit.
AFTER peaches, plums, citrons or quinces have been preserved, take the fruit from the syrup and drain it in a sieve. To a pound of loaf sugar put half a teacupful of water; when it is dissolved, set it over a moderate fire; when boiling-hot, put in the fruit; stir it continually until the sugar is candied about it; then take it upon a sieve, and dry it in a warm oven or before a fire. Repeat this two or three times, if you wish.
DE
Two recipes run together here, both fondant-style sugar work described without a thermometer. The stray line about "a showy house of seven rooms" is bleed-through from an advertisement or another page and has nothing to do with the candy.
- The hinge: cook to the soft-ball stageTwo cups sugar to a quarter cup water, boiled until it "begins to get somewhat stiff" on cooling, points to a fondant syrup, which on a modern thermometer falls somewhere around the soft-ball range of roughly 235-240F. Under-boiled it never sets; boiled much further it tends to set hard and crumbly rather than creamy. The recipe itself offers no test but the feel of the cooling mass.
- Stirring while coolSetting the pan in a larger pan of water and stirring as it cools is deliberate fondant technique: agitation at moderate temperature forces small sugar crystals and a smooth, opaque candy. Stirring while the syrup is still very hot gives a coarse, grainy result.
- How much coconutNo quantity is given. A batch from two cupfuls of sugar will take a good deal of grated coconut before it stops holding together; add it gradually and stop when the mass is stiff but still spreadable.
- Fresh versus packaged coconut"Grated cocoanut" in a book of this period would normally mean meat cracked from a whole nut, unsweetened and fairly moist. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the candy cloying and drier; unsweetened desiccated coconut is closer, though it absorbs more syrup.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct substitute in the candied-fruit recipe.
- A teacupfulPeriod teacups run smaller than modern mugs — reckon about 3/4 cup, so roughly 6 tablespoons of water to a pound of sugar. The exact figure is not critical here since the syrup is boiled down anyway.
- "A warm oven" for dryingHere this means a slack, barely-heated oven; in a modern one, the lowest setting it will hold with the door propped ajar. Too much heat softens the sugar coat instead of setting it, and the fruit sticks to the sieve.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield; cut the slab into small squares as the text directs. Both keep best in a tin with waxed paper between layers; refrigeration tends to make fondant weep.
Coconut candy of this kind belongs to a period of cheap refined sugar and imported coconut meeting in the domestic kitchen. Whole coconuts reached northern US ports in quantity through the Caribbean trade in the second half of the nineteenth century, and shredded, packaged coconut was being sold commercially by the closing decades of the century, though how far that displaced hand-grating in ordinary households is not something this recipe can tell us. The candied-fruit recipe is older in spirit: it is a way of using up fruit already put down in syrup, taking the drained preserves and building a dry sugar crust on them by repeated boiling and drying - broadly the method behind what earlier confectioners called dry suckets. The instruction to "repeat this two or three times, if you wish" leaves the thickness of the shell to the cook rather than fixing a rule.