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Cocoanut Romance
1 package Dromedary Cocoanut 5 eggs-whites only 4 tablespoons sugar 2 cups whipped cream A few Dromedary Dates stoned Beat up whites of eggs to a stiff froth, beat in cocoanut, sugar and cream and mix well together. Serve in glasses, topped with dates.
A promotional booklet dessert of the whipped-cream-and-coconut school, assembled cold and served in stemmed glasses. The problem is structural rather than a matter of technique: nothing in it is ever heated.
- Raw egg white is the whole binderFive egg whites are beaten to a froth and folded into cream and coconut, then spooned into glasses and served. There is no cooking step, no sugar syrup poured in hot, no baking. Salmonella Enteritidis can be present inside an intact shell egg, and whites are not exempt; nothing later in this recipe brings the mixture anywhere near a temperature that would matter.
- Cold storage does not fix itChilling a beaten-white dessert slows bacterial growth but kills nothing, and a dish of this type sits at room temperature while it is being served and eaten. If you want a coconut cream dessert of this shape, use a current recipe built on a cooked base.
- "1 package Dromedary Cocoanut"The booklet assumes its own product and never states a weight. Brand packages of shredded coconut of the period are usually said to have run in the neighbourhood of 4 ounces, which would be something over a cup loosely packed, but any modern reading of the recipe has to guess.
- "2 cups whipped cream" is ambiguousPeriod booklets use this phrase for both the volume of liquid cream before whipping and the volume after, and cream roughly doubles. The difference is about a cup of heavy cream, which is not a trivial gap in a recipe with no other structure.
- "Cocoanut"The older spelling, standard well into the twentieth century, usually attributed to confusion with cacao. It is ordinary coconut, though brand shred of the period was generally sweetened and moister than the desiccated coconut sold as a baking staple now.
- "Stoned" datesPitted.
- YieldThe original gives none. Five whites folded into two cups of cream and a package of coconut makes a very large volume of foam, enough to fill six to eight serving glasses.
Dromedary was the date and coconut brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, a firm built on imported Middle Eastern dates long before it added shredded coconut and, later, packaged cake mixes and pimientos. Booklets like this one existed to give buyers something to do with a whole package at once. The dessert itself belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century "cream sweets" that leaned on beaten egg white to give body without gelatine or cooking. The name is catalogue copy, of a piece with the exotic origin the brand's camel trademark was selling.