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Cocoanut Macaroons (No. 2)
3 eggs (whites only beaten stiff) ½ pound desiccated cocoanut ¾ cup granulated sugar.
Drop from teaspoon on buttered baking sheet. Cook in moderate oven till slightly brown.
Four ingredients and one sentence of method, which means the details the original leaves out are the ones that decide whether these hold their shape.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. Coconut and sugar brown fast, so check at 12 minutes; 15 to 18 minutes is usually enough for a teaspoon-sized drop. If they colour before they set, drop to 325F.
- Desiccated cocoanut is not sweetened flakeThe book means dry, finely shredded unsweetened coconut. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is moister and much sweeter; using it will slacken the mixture and make the macaroons cloying. Half a pound of desiccated coconut is roughly 3 cups.
- Fold, do not stirThe whipped whites are the only structure here. Fold the coconut and sugar through in two additions with a spatula so the foam survives; beaten flat, the mixture spreads into wafers.
- Sugar timingThe recipe lists sugar separately, but the reliable route is to beat about half of it into the whites once they hold soft peaks, then fold in the rest with the coconut. That stabilises the meringue and stops it weeping on the sheet.
- Buttered sheetSugar-heavy drops weld themselves to metal. Parchment does the job better than butter and lets you lift them off intact; if you butter, loosen them while still warm but let them firm for a minute first.
- Shape and spacingMound them rather than flattening, and leave about an inch and a half between. They spread only slightly but the edges scorch if they touch.
- YieldAbout two to three dozen teaspoon-sized macaroons. They keep two or three days in a tin; an airtight container with a sheet of waxed paper between layers stops them going tacky.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour, which is why the small-cake chapters run to several numbered variants of the same idea — the book was assembled largely from recipes sent in by users of the flour, so duplicates with slight differences were printed side by side rather than reconciled. Macaroons themselves take their name from the Italian maccarone, by way of the French macaron, and the older form is an almond confection; the coconut version became common in North America and Britain after desiccated coconut became a cheap, shelf-stable pantry staple in the later nineteenth century. That this recipe contains no flour at all is worth noting in a flour company's cookbook.