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Sugarless Cocoanut Patties
1 lb. Dromedary Cocoanut 1 can condensed milk 2 eggs, whites only Put cocoanut into a bowl, add milk and whites of eggs and mix and beat well.
Drop from a spoon on greased inverted cake tins and bake in a slow oven.
Sufficient for fifty patties. a
A three-ingredient macaroon in all but name, from an era when a canned-goods company printed recipes to move its own shredded coconut. Little needs changing, but two of the three ingredients have shifted since it was written.
- "Condensed milk" means sweetenedIn this period, condensed milk meant the thick sweetened kind; evaporated milk was sold separately and will not work here. That is where all the sweetness comes from, which is what "sugarless" refers to. The recipe does not state a can size, so if your can is smaller than the one intended the mixture may come out slightly drier.
- A slow oven is 300FBake at 300 to 325F. The point is to set the egg white and dry the coconut without scorching the milk sugars, which brown fast. Expect 20 to 25 minutes, until the peaks and edges are pale gold and the bases are firm.
- The coconutA pound of dried shredded coconut, unsweetened, matches what the tin held. Sweetened flake coconut from a modern bag makes these cloyingly sweet next to the condensed milk, and its added moisture loosens the mixture.
- Inverted cake tinsThe instruction is telling you to use the flat underside of a pan as a baking sheet. A parchment-lined half sheet is better; this mixture sticks hard to bare greased metal.
- Beat the whites in, do not foldThe recipe says mix and beat well, and means it. The whites are not whipped for lift here, they are the glue, so a stiff paste that holds a spoon-dropped peak is the target. If it slumps flat on the pan, add more coconut rather than more heat.
- Yield and scaleFifty patties from a full pound of coconut plus a can of milk works out to roughly a tablespoon of mixture apiece. Halving the recipe is sensible for a household; use one egg white and half a can, and refrigerate the leftover milk.
- KeepingCool completely before lifting them or they tear. Stored airtight they keep chewy for some days and harden with time.
Dromedary was the brand name of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates but also a major packer of shredded coconut, candied fruit and citrus peel in the early twentieth century. Booklets like this one existed to give a home cook a reason to buy the tin, which is why the branded ingredient appears by name in the ingredient list rather than as a generic. The "sugarless" framing is suggestive of the sugar-conscious years around the First World War, when American households faced voluntary and then actual restrictions on sugar and publishers filled pamphlets with sweets leaning on condensed milk, honey, corn syrup and dried fruit instead, though such a title could equally have served a diabetic or economy audience and so does not fix the date. The dish itself is a coconut macaroon of the simplest sort, a form generally traced to the almond macaroons of southern Europe, with coconut substituted once cheap desiccated coconut reached Western markets.