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Cocoa-Nut Paste
Drain the milk from a large cocoa-nut, pare off the brown skin, and shred the white part as finely as possible; put a pound of sugar into a saucepan with a cupful of water, the shredded cocoa-nut, and, if it is perfectly sweet, the milk of the cocoa-nut. Let the mixture boil gently until the syrup seems likely to return to sugar, when the whisked whites of two eggs may be added. Turn the paste on a dish and dry at the mouth of a slow oven.
A Victorian coconut confection, closer to a rough coconut ice or a chewy macaroon paste than anything set in a tin. The whole thing turns on catching the syrup at the point where it is just about to crystallise.
- "Until the syrup seems likely to return to sugar"This is the hinge. The sugar is boiled until it thickens, clouds slightly and begins to grain at the edges of the pan. On a modern thermometer that point falls somewhere in the soft-ball to firm-ball range, but the recipe gives no temperature and the visual cue is what counts. Pull it too early and the paste never firms; take it much past and you get a dry, sandy mass.
- Cocoa-nut milkIn this period the term means the thin liquid inside the nut, not the pressed coconut cream sold in cans today. Substituting canned coconut milk adds fat and will change the set.
- "If it is perfectly sweet"A rancidity check, and worth keeping. Coconut oil goes off readily; taste the drained water and the flesh, and discard both if there is any soapy or sour note.
- A large cocoa-nutA mature nut yields very roughly 3 to 4 cups of finely shredded flesh, though this varies a good deal from nut to nut. Unsweetened desiccated coconut can stand in, though the texture is drier.
- Shredding"As finely as possible" mattered when this was done on a hand grater. The fine side of a box grater or a few pulses in a food processor gets there faster; avoid reducing it to powder, which loses the chew.
- The egg whitesWhisked whites folded into hot syrup lighten the paste and help it hold shape. Add them off the direct heat and work quickly, or they will scramble in strings.
- "The mouth of a slow oven"A slow oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 250-300F, and the mouth is the opening at the front, gentler still. The aim is to dry the surface slowly, not to bake or colour it.
- Yield and keepingAbout a pound and a half of paste. Cut into squares once cold and store airtight; the high sugar content keeps it a week or two, though it stiffens as it dries.
Coconut is generally reckoned to have become familiar in British kitchens during the nineteenth century. By then it was treated as an everyday sweetmeat ingredient rather than an exotic one, and this paste belongs to the same family as coconut ice and coconut candy, sugar boiled with shredded flesh, a technique drawn from older sugar-confectionery practice. The addition of whisked whites and a spell drying at the oven mouth points back further still, to the small dried sweetmeats and "cakes" of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century still-room, where residual heat from a cooling oven was the standard tool for finishing preserves and pastes.