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Cocoanut Snowballs
4 cups powdered sugar 1 egg-white 4 tablespoons water 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract Mix sugar, egg-white and water, then add cocoanut and extracts. Beat until stiff, and mold into balls. Set away to harden.
A no-cook fondant candy of the kind confectioners called an uncooked cream: sugar bound with egg white and water rather than boiled to a syrup stage. The binder is the problem.
- The egg white is never cookedNothing in this recipe brings the white above room temperature, and the balls are then simply "set away" to dry. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and inside the egg, and sugar at this concentration does not reliably kill it. Drying the surface hardens the outside while the interior stays a moist, unheated egg mixture.
- Sugar is not a safeguard hereVery high sugar confections can be inhospitable to bacteria, but a low-moisture environment only discourages growth; it does not kill anything already present, and this mixture is never held at a lethal temperature. Use a current recipe for uncooked coconut candy, one built on pasteurized whites or on sweetened condensed milk.
- "Powdered sugar" in this periodBy the early twentieth century American powdered or confectioners' sugar was the fine, starch-cut product sold today, not the coarser crushed loaf sugar of the previous century. Four cups is roughly a pound.
- Dromedary CocoanutA canned, moist shredded coconut sold by Hills Brothers, the same firm behind Dromedary dates. It was wetter and softer than modern bagged desiccated coconut.
- Two extracts, not oneThe half teaspoon of lemon is doing real work: it cuts the flat sweetness of a candy that is essentially sugar and coconut.
Dromedary was the grocery brand of Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates and for canned shredded coconut, and like many branded firms of the era it published small recipe booklets whose real purpose was to find more uses for a single product. Coconut had become an American pantry staple in the late nineteenth century once mechanical shredding and canning made it possible to sell the meat far from the tropics, and "snowball" was a name often applied to white coconut confections, from these uncooked fondant balls to iced cupcakes and ice cream. The recipe belongs to a whole family of uncooked creams that appeared in home-economics pamphlets and children's candy-making chapters precisely because they required no thermometer and no boiling sugar, a virtue then and the source of the problem now.