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Cocoanut Drops
3 eggs (whites only) beaten stiff 1 cup icing sugar 2 cups grated cocoanut 2 tablespoons Five Roses flour.
Drop from spoon on buttered pan, and bake in quick oven. 3 eggs
A three-ingredient meringue macaroon, written for a cook who already knew what a stiff white and a hot oven looked like. The only real decisions are the coconut and the heat.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whites are the only leavening and the only structure. Add the sugar, coconut and flour in stages and fold with a spatula until just combined; a beaten-down batter spreads flat and bakes to candy rather than to a light drop.
- "Quick oven"In period terms roughly 400-450F. At that heat a small mound of sugared coconut browns fast and can scorch at the edges, which is why many later versions of this cookie are baked at 325-350F for 15-20 minutes. If you follow the original literally, watch them constantly.
- Icing sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar, sifted. Modern boxed powdered sugar carries 2-3 percent cornstarch, which helps here rather than hurts " it absorbs a little moisture from the whites.
- Grated cocoanutThe recipe says only "grated cocoanut," which could mean fresh coconut grated at home or the dried shredded product then sold in packets; either way it is unsweetened. Two cups of today's sweetened flaked coconut will make a much sweeter, wetter drop; unsweetened desiccated coconut is the closer match, and you may want to add a spoonful of white to bring the mixture together.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour. Two tablespoons is a binder, not a structural ingredient — any all-purpose flour does the same job.
- Buttered panButter alone on a modern thin sheet invites sticking and over-browning on the bottom. Parchment on a heavy sheet is the practical substitute, and the drops lift off cleanly once cool.
- Yield and shapeExpect about 24 to 30 drops from three whites, spooned in walnut-sized mounds an inch apart. They barely spread, so they can be set fairly close.
- Cooling and keepingLet them firm on the sheet for a minute before moving; hot meringue tears. Once cold they keep several days in a tin, but they soften quickly in humid air.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to buyers of its flour " a promotional book, which is why the brand name appears inside the ingredient list of a cookie that needs only two tablespoons of flour. Coconut drops of this kind spread widely through North American home baking in the late nineteenth century, once shipping and mechanical grating made coconut a grocery item rather than a curiosity; the shredded, dried product sold in packets made a formerly laborious recipe into an afternoon's work. The construction is simply a meringue stiffened with coconut, and it belongs to the same family as the almond macaroon, which is generally traced back through European convent and Jewish Passover baking where an egg-white batter with no flour was the point.