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Cocoanut Rocks
½ cup butter 2 eggs ½ pound cocoanut ½ cup white sugar 1 teaspoon baking powder Five Roses flour to make stiff.
Mix with hands. Roll out like cookies, and bake.
A contributed recipe of the barest kind, typical of the Five Roses collection: no oven heat, no flour quantity, no time. Here is what the gaps mean in practice.
- Flour "to make stiff"With this fat, sugar and coconut you will need roughly 1½ to 2 cups of all-purpose flour to reach a dough that holds a rolled shape. Add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough stops sticking to the hands; more flour than that gives a dry, mealy rock.
- CocoanutHalf a pound is about 2½ to 3 cups of dry unsweetened desiccated shredded coconut, which is the form grocers of the period generally sold. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is moister and sweeter, so if you use it, cut the sugar back.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. In a modern oven, 350-375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges and the exposed coconut are just coloured.
- "Mix with hands"Not a quaint flourish. Butter, sugar and egg beaten smooth first, then coconut and flour worked in by hand, because the coconut is too coarse and the dough too stiff for a spoon.
- RollingCoconut tears a rolled sheet. Chill the dough half an hour, roll no thinner than a quarter inch between sheets of parchment, and cut with a plain round cutter. Dropping and flattening spoonfuls works as well and is closer to what the name suggests.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon to this much flour is a light hand; expect a dense, chewy result rather than a risen one. Use modern double-acting powder as measured.
- YieldAbout two to three dozen small cakes, depending on the cutter. They keep well in a tin for several days and firm up as they cool, so judge doneness by colour, not by feel on the sheet.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, and its contents came largely from Canadian housewives who submitted favourite recipes to the miller — which is why so many entries, this one included, read like notes jotted for someone who already knows the method. "Cocoanut" was one common English spelling well into the twentieth century, and the ingredient itself had only recently become an everyday pantry item: desiccated shredded coconut reached inland North American groceries in quantity in the last decades of the 1800s, and cheap sweet coconut cakes, macaroons and "rocks" followed close behind. The name "rock" is usually explained as a description of the craggy, unsmoothed look of a dough held together by coarse shreds — the same logic often said to lie behind rock cakes and rock buns in British baking of the period.