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Cocoanut Macaroons
Two cups cocoanut, one-half cup sugar, whites of two eggs; mix cocoanut and sugar together, then add whites of eggs, well beaten.
— Mrs. I. R. Fitchett
A three-ingredient meringue-bound macaroon of the sort that filled community cookbooks around 1900. The receipt assumes you know how to bake a small drop cookie, so the oven and the timing are left to you.
- OvenNothing is stated; the receipt leaves the oven to you. A moderate 325F suits it: hotter than that and the exposed coconut shreds scorch before the centres set.
- The coconut matters most"Cocoanut" in this period usually meant dried unsweetened shredded coconut, or coconut grated fresh at home. Modern bagged sweetened flake is moister and much sweeter, so if that is what you have, cut the sugar back or the macaroons will spread and candy.
- Beating the whites"Well beaten" is ambiguous in period usage; a soft foam to soft peak is the safer reading, since the whites act mainly as a binder and a very stiff meringue tends to break down when folded into dry coconut.
- Consistency checkTwo large egg whites should just hold two cups of coconut together in a mass that clumps when squeezed. Period eggs were ungraded and may have run smaller than today's large, so if the mix looks soupy, add coconut rather than a third white.
- Shaping and panDrop or press into small mounds about a tablespoon each, spaced an inch apart; they hold their shape and barely spread. Parchment is worth using, as the sugar and white weld to a bare sheet.
- Timing and donenessFifteen to twenty minutes at 325F, until the tips of the coconut are golden and the bases set. Let them cool on the sheet before lifting or they tear.
- YieldTwo cups of coconut dropped by the tablespoon will give roughly two to three dozen small macaroons.
- KeepingAirtight and eaten within two or three days. With no added fat and no flour, they go from chewy to leathery quickly in open air.
Coconut macaroons descend from the older almond macaroon, an egg-white-and-nut confection often said to have originated in Italian convent baking and carried into English and American kitchens by the eighteenth century. Coconut gained on almond in American home baking in the later nineteenth century, and cost was probably one reason among several: shipping from the Caribbean and the rise of packaged desiccated coconut made it cheap and shelf-stable, while blanched ground almonds remained a comparative luxury. A receipt like this one, contributed to a village collection, is typical of the form: three ingredients, no oven temperature, no yield.