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Gingerbread, Cocoa-Nut
Proceed in the same way as directed for Almond Gingerbread (see GINGERBREAD, ALMOND), substituting rasped cocoa-nut for pounded almonds.
A one-line variation recipe of the kind Cassell's used constantly: the method lives elsewhere in the book, and only the substitution is given here. Everything practical hinges on how differently coconut behaves from almonds.
- You need the parent recipeNothing here works without the Almond Gingerbread entry, which supplies the quantities and the mixing order. Read that first and treat this line as an amendment to it.
- "Rasped cocoa-nut"A rasp was a coarse file used on the white meat of a fresh coconut, giving fine dry shreds rather than the wet flakes of a modern box grater. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is the closest supermarket equivalent; if you use fresh, grate it finely and spread it out to dry for an hour or so.
- Weight for weight, not volume for volumePounded almonds are much denser than rasped coconut, so a cupful of one is not a cupful of the other. Match the almonds by weight rather than by volume.
- Coconut drinks liquidCoconut takes up liquid -- Dried coconut absorbs moisture from the mixture as it stands, more so than pounded almonds. Bake soon after mixing, and be prepared to add a little more liquid to reach a workable consistency.
- OvenGingerbread of this type wants a moderate to slow oven and no hotter. Treacle and coconut both scorch, and a hot oven will darken the surface long before the centre is set.
- Watch the edgesShredded coconut at the surface browns and then burns while the interior is still soft. If the top is colouring too fast, lay a sheet of parchment over it for the last part of the bake.
- KeepingTreacle gingerbreads generally keep well and often improve after a day or two in a tin, softening as the syrup draws moisture through the crumb.
Cassell's is built on this kind of cross-reference: one full method followed by a string of one-line variants, which let a large dictionary cover hundreds of dishes without repeating itself. Coconut reached British kitchens in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, first as whole nuts from the West Indies and Ceylon; commercially dried and shredded "desiccated" coconut is generally traced to roughly the late 1880s and 1890s in Ceylon, at or after this dictionary's own period, so it cannot be what "rasped cocoa-nut" means here. Substitution for ground almonds may well be the point of the entry, though the economic motive is plausible inference rather than documented practice: almonds were expensive, and gingerbread's treacle and spice were forgiving enough to carry a cheaper substitute.