Snow Flakes
Grate a large cocoa-nut into a glass dish, and serve with cream, preserves, jellies or jams.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but it depends entirely on handling a whole coconut, which is the part most cooks now skip. Everything hinges on the freshness of the nut.
- "Cocoa-nut" is coconutThe usual spelling in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and unrelated botanically to cocoa or chocolate. A "large" nut would have been a mature brown one, broadly comparable to what is sold today.
- Choosing the nutShake it before buying; you should hear liquid sloshing. A dry nut has usually gone rancid or mouldy inside, and the flesh will taste soapy. Check the three eyes for damp or dark patches.
- Opening itPierce two of the eyes with a screwdriver or skewer and drain the water, then tap firmly around the nut's equator with the back of a heavy knife or a hammer, turning as you go, until it splits. Baking the drained nut at 350F for 10 to 15 minutes makes the shell crack more willingly and loosens the flesh.
- The brown skinThe recipe does not mention it, but the thin brown testa clinging to the white meat should be pared off with a vegetable peeler. Grated in, it speckles the dish grey and defeats the point of calling it snow flakes.
- GratingA box grater on the coarse side gives the flaky texture the name refers to; a food processor tends to produce damp crumbs instead. Grate shortly before serving, since exposed coconut dries out and discolours fairly quickly.
- Do not substitute the bagged kindSweetened desiccated coconut is dry, sugared and chewy, and produces nothing like this. If you cannot get a whole nut, frozen grated coconut from a Southeast Asian or Caribbean grocer is the nearest thing.
- Yield and servingOne large coconut gives roughly 3 to 4 cups grated. The recipe calls for a single glass dish rather than individual ones. "Cream" here is most likely plain unwhipped cream rather than whipped; the jams and jellies read as alternatives, not all at once.
Snow Flakes belongs to a small family of Victorian "fruit" desserts that consisted of little more than an expensive ingredient displayed in glass. Coconuts reached inland American markets in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Minneapolis in 1877 a whole nut was a novelty a Midwestern housekeeper could reasonably buy but would not treat casually. The instruction to grate it into a glass dish is the whole recipe because the point was the look of it: white shreds heaped up like drifted snow, with cream or a spoonful of the year's preserves alongside. The same book's cake chapters use grated coconut in more laborious ways, which may suggest — though this is guesswork — that this entry was there for the cook who had a nut and a few spare minutes rather than a nut and an afternoon.