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Cocoanut Drop Cookies
One half pound grated cocoanut, one-third pound sugar, two eggs, one tablespoon flour, drop on buttered pans and bake quickly.
A four-ingredient coconut macaroon, written for a cook who already knew what a drop cookie should look like. The proportions work, but the coconut and the oven both need translating.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of freshly grated coconut is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups, loosely packed. A third of a pound of sugar is about 3/4 cup.
- The coconut is the hinge'Grated cocoanut' here most likely means the flesh of a fresh nut, grated — moist, unsweetened, and fairly wet. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the batter cloying and slack; unsweetened desiccated coconut is drier, so the mixture may need a little more egg to hold together.
- "Bake quickly"The instruction implies a hot oven rather than a stated temperature; around 400-425F suits these. At that heat small drops set in roughly 8 to 10 minutes, and the exposed shreds colour fast, so start watching them early.
- EggsEggs of the period were often smaller than today's large. Two medium eggs are a reasonable reading, or two large if working with dry desiccated coconut, which absorbs more.
- MixingNo beating is specified: whole eggs stirred in are enough to bind. Whipping the whites separately gives a lighter, meringue-style macaroon, but that is a departure from what is written.
- Buttered pansButtered tins at this temperature encourage the sugar at the base to catch. Parchment is the practical substitute and lets the cookies lift off whole.
- Yield and keepingTeaspoon-sized drops from this quantity will give somewhere in the region of two to three dozen. They are best the day they are baked; the coconut dries out quickly in an open tin.
Coconut drops of this kind sit at the simple end of the macaroon family — a paste of nut, sugar and egg, baked hot and fast, with almonds swapped for coconut. Coconut became a routine American baking ingredient in the later nineteenth century, when shredded and desiccated coconut began to be sold in packages and cooks were spared the work of cracking and grating the whole nut; before that, recipes such as this one assumed the nut itself, and the single spoonful of flour is there mainly to keep the wet fresh gratings from spreading.