Home › Cocoanut Breakfast Dishes › Cocoanut Corn Crispies
Cocoanut Corn Crispies
2 cups corn meal 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sirup or honey 1 egg 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons fat 1/2 cup Dromedary Cocoanut Mix the cocoanut, corn meal, baking powder, salt, sirup or honey, add the egg, well beaten, the milk and the fat (or butter substitute). Divide into greased corncob or plain molds and bake in a hot oven for 20 minutes.
A quick cornbread batter stretched with shredded coconut and baked in cast-iron corn stick pans. Nothing here is difficult, but the pans and the oven matter more than the ingredient list suggests.
- "A hot oven"Read this as roughly 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is right for small corn stick or muffin-sized portions; a full pan of batter would need longer and would defeat the point of the recipe.
- Corncob moldsThese are cast-iron corn stick pans, still made today. Grease them and heat them empty in the oven before filling — the batter should hiss when it goes in. That is what gives the crisp shell the name promises.
- Dromedary CocoanutPackaged shredded coconut. Half a cup is roughly 1.5 oz. Modern sweetened flake works directly; unsweetened desiccated coconut is drier and will pull moisture from the batter, so add a splash more milk if you use it.
- SirupSimply the older spelling of syrup. Cane, corn or golden syrup all suit; the tablespoon is there for browning and a little tenderness, not sweetness.
- "Fat (or butter substitute)"Melt it before adding. Butter, bacon drippings or a neutral shortening all work — the parenthesis reflects a period when oleomargarine and vegetable shortening were being promoted as economies.
- MixingCombine dry and wet with a few strokes only. Cornmeal batters raised with baking powder toughen quickly if beaten, and the leavening starts working the moment the milk goes in, so have the pans hot and ready.
- YieldRoughly a dozen corn sticks or muffins, depending on mold size. Best eaten within an hour of baking; they stale fast, as cornmeal quick breads tend to.
Dromedary was the brand name used by the Hills Brothers Company of New York for dates, and later for shredded coconut and other packaged goods; booklets like this one existed to find as many uses for the product as a household could stand, which is why coconut turns up in a pan of corn sticks at breakfast. Corn stick pans — shallow cast-iron molds shaped like ears of corn — are generally thought to have become common American kitchen equipment by the late nineteenth century and remain in production, and the recipe's assumption that a reader owns one says something about how ordinary they were. The offhand "or butter substitute" places the booklet in the era when margarine and vegetable shortenings were being pushed hard as household economies, a trend that accelerated sharply around the First World War, when wheat conservation also sent cornmeal back onto the breakfast table.