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Cocoanut Macaroons
½ pound sugar ½ pound cocoanut 4 eggs (whites) No. 1 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour.
Mix all together, and make into small cakes. Bake slowly.
A four-ingredient meringue-style macaroon written for cooks who worked by the pound and judged the oven by hand. The proportions are sound; only the units and the oven need translating.
- The weights½ lb granulated sugar is about 1⅛ cups. ½ lb dried shredded coconut is roughly 2½ to 3 cups, depending how finely it is cut — go by weight if you can, since volume varies wildly between fine desiccated and long-shred.
- "Cocoanut"This would generally have meant dried coconut sold by the pound, often unsweetened, though sweetened moist coconut was also on the market by this date. Modern sweetened flake will make the cakes sweeter and much softer; unsweetened desiccated or fine shred is the closer match.
- "4 eggs (whites) No. 1"The "No. 1" is not an instruction about the eggs; it most likely belongs to the recipe's own numbering, this being one of several versions of the dish. Read the line simply as the whites of four eggs, unbeaten or lightly broken up.
- Whites unbeatenNothing here says to whip them, and the mixture is meant to be a stiff, sticky paste rather than a foam. Mix, then let it stand ten minutes so the coconut drinks up the sugar syrup; if it slumps, add coconut a spoonful at a time.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven, in modern terms somewhere around 275–325°F. The point is to dry the macaroons through and set the sugar without browning the coconut, which scorches fast; start checking at about 20 minutes, until the tips are pale gold and the bases lift cleanly.
- The panThis mixture sticks hard to bare metal. Use parchment, or the greased paper often used for macaroons in this period.
- The flourOne tablespoon in the whole batch is there to bind, not to make a batter. Do not increase it or the macaroons turn cakey.
- YieldThree dozen or more small cakes, depending on how large you drop them. They keep several days in a tin and stale quickly in the open air.
Coconut macaroons descend from the older almond macaroon of southern Europe — ground nuts, sugar and egg white, no flour and no leavening — and the swap of coconut for almond followed the trade routes that made dried coconut cheap in North America in the later nineteenth century. By the time this book was compiled for Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote Five Roses flour, shredded coconut was a staple pantry item in Canadian kitchens, and recipes like this one were a common feature of the small-cakes chapters of the era. The single token tablespoon of flour is worth noticing: it is barely functional, and one might suspect that in a mill's cookbook it served to put the brand name into a recipe that hardly needs flour at all.