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Cocoa-Nut Drops
One pound cocoa-nut, half pound powdered sugar, and the white of an egg; work all together and roll into little balls in the hand; bake on buttered tins.-C. W. Cyphers, Minneapolis, Minn.
A three-ingredient coconut macaroon from the confectionery chapter, written for cooks who cracked and grated their own coconut. The proportions need adjusting if you are working from a bag.
- "Cocoa-nut" is coconutThe nineteenth-century spelling reflects a long-standing confusion with cacao; no chocolate is involved. A pound means a pound of freshly grated white coconut meat, roughly the yield of one or two mature nuts.
- Fresh versus packaged coconutFresh grated coconut is moist and unsweetened. Dried unsweetened (desiccated) coconut is the closest substitute but will not bind with one egg white — count on two or three whites, or soak the coconut briefly in a little milk or coconut water. Sweetened flaked coconut makes the drops cloying at this sugar ratio; cut the sugar by about half if that is what you have.
- Powdered sugarIn 1877 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar is the honest equivalent; modern confectioners' sugar will work but dries the mixture slightly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 325F — these want to set and take colour at the edges without the sugar caramelising. Fifteen to twenty minutes for walnut-sized balls.
- Buttered tinsSound advice in a cast-iron era, but butter encourages the sugary bases to spread and stick. Parchment on a heavy sheet is more reliable and lets the drops lift off whole.
- Working the mixture"Work all together" means compress the mixture, not whip it. The recipe calls for a single white and does not say to beat it; it acts essentially as glue, so squeeze each ball firmly in the palm to hold its shape, since there is no flour or leavening to hold it for you.
- YieldAbout three dozen small drops. They are best the day they are baked and go tough within two or three days in a tin.
Coconut drops of this kind sit at the meeting point of two Victorian kitchen habits: the almond macaroon, bound with egg white and sugar in exactly this way, and the growing availability of coconut in American kitchens after mid-century. Cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s are full of coconut — pies, custards, cakes, drops — and Buckeye Cookery treats it as an everyday sweet rather than a luxury. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the book's method: contributors from across the Midwest sent in what they actually made, signed their names and their towns, and assumed the reader already knew how her own stove behaved. That assumption is probably why no temperature or time appears here.