Home › Delicious Cocoanut Candies › Simplicity
Simplicity
Place one cup of Dromedary Cocoanut in a bowl which stands in boiling water for 20 minutes. Pour three tablespoonfuls of white Karo Sirup over cocoanut, and chopped dates or nuts, or both, turn out onto a marble slab which is covered with confectioners' sugar. Form into balls or cubes. Roll in chopped cocoanut, if desired, or dip in melted chocolate.
DELICIOUS
An uncooked confection built from three pantry items, written as advertising copy and therefore vague about quantities. The one thing that matters is heat: the coconut must be warmed through so the syrup can bind it, or the mixture will never hold a shape.
- The hinge is the warm bowlTwenty minutes over boiling water softens and slightly steams the dried coconut so it absorbs the syrup instead of shedding it. Add the syrup while the coconut is still hot; a cooled mixture stays crumbly.
- Dromedary CocoanutPackaged shredded coconut, sold in tins and bags; how moist or sweetened it was is not clear from the recipe, though the 20-minute steaming suggests it arrived dry. Sweetened shredded coconut is a workable match; with unsweetened, expect a drier mass that may want a fourth tablespoon of syrup.
- White Karo SirupLight corn syrup, unchanged in kind and still on shelves. Golden syrup works but darkens the candy and adds a caramel note.
- Unstated quantitiesThe dates and nuts are left entirely to the cook. About half a cup of finely chopped dates and a quarter cup of nuts to one cup of coconut gives a mixture that still binds; much more and the syrup cannot hold it together.
- The marble slabMarble was standard candy equipment because it stays cool. A sheet pan or a piece of parchment dusted with confectioners' sugar does the same job here, since nothing is being cooked to a temperature.
- Dipping in chocolateFor a coating that sets firm and does not bloom, temper the chocolate or use a compound coating. Untempered melted chocolate will set soft and streaky, though it tastes the same.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 16 to 20 small balls. Store them airtight between layers of parchment; they will stiffen and dry as they sit, so eat them within a few days.
Dromedary was the brand name of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, which built its business on dates and shredded coconut and promoted both through free recipe booklets of exactly this kind — short, breezy entries that name the product in every line. Karo, the light corn syrup that binds these candies, was another early twentieth-century branded staple, and its appearance here reflects the way corn syrup was marketed for home candy-making: no thermometer, no soft-ball stage, less risk of graining. Uncooked confections of this sort appear often in booklets of the 1910s and 1920s, pitched as something an inexperienced cook could manage, and the single-word verdict at the end — DELICIOUS — is the booklet talking to itself, a reminder that the page was written to sell coconut rather than to instruct.