Praline Cocoanut
Take a fresh cocoanut, break it open and grate it carefully. Take a cupful to two cupfuls and a half of the best white sugar. Put the sugar in a nice clean saucepan to cook until it candies. Add the cocoanut. Let it cook a moment, turning it all the time. Put it in pats on a large china dish or a piece of marble. Do the same with brown sugar.
New Orleans’ beloved coconut praline in its simplest form — sugar cooked to the candy stage and bound with fresh grated coconut.
- “Until it candies”Cook the sugar to the soft-ball stage, about 235–240°F on a candy thermometer; a drop should form a soft ball in cold water.
- Fresh vs. packaged coconutA whole grated fresh coconut is traditional, but unsweetened shredded or desiccated coconut works well — avoid the sweetened bagged kind or the candy turns cloying.
- Loose sugar ratioThe original’s “one to two and a half cups” is vague; start with about 2 cups sugar to 1½ cups coconut and adjust.
- “Put it in pats”Drop spoonfuls onto parchment, a buttered marble slab, or a silicone mat and let them set into patties.
- Work fastCooked sugar stiffens quickly — have the coconut grated and your surface ready before the sugar reaches temperature.
- Two versionsMake one batch with white sugar for a pale praline and one with brown for a deeper, molasses-tinged one.
The word praline reaches back to seventeenth-century France, where — by tradition — a cook in the household of the French marshal and diplomat the duc de Choiseul, comte du Plessis-Praslin, coated almonds in caramelized sugar and named them for his master. Carried to Louisiana by French settlers, the confection was transformed by what grew there: cooks traded costly almonds for native pecans and, as here, for tropical coconut. The New Orleans praline that resulted is softer and creamier than its French ancestor — less a sugared nut than a candy in its own right.
From page 62 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
