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Cocoanut Cream Candy
Grate one cocoanut and set aside. Boil one and a half pounds of sugar with the milk of the cocoanut, heating very slowly till sugar is melted. Boil then for five or six minutes gently; add the grated cocoanut and boil ten minutes longer. Stir continually. Pour on buttered plates and give forty-eight hours as time for hardening.
COCOANUT MOUSSE (Frozen) Have ready one cup of fresh, pounded cocoanut and add to it a pint of the richest cocoanut "cream" and milk, or half a pint of cocoanut milk and a half pint of whipped cream (from cow's milk). Add three-fourths cup of sugar and a tiny pinch of salt, then stir in a small tablespoon of gelatine which has been dissolved in two tablespoons of water and strained. Freeze. (For one quart.) • The cocoanut, particularly the fresh-picked fruit, lends itself or its milk to almost every form of frozen dainty, making most attractive ices, ice-creams, etc., and in many forms supposedly adapted only to other (more strictly) fruit it is delightful as foundation or accessory.
The palm-cabbage, or the stalk-ends, may be used, uncooked, in salads, or delicately cooked (like cauliflower), or pickled.
T CHAPTER XXIII THE JAPANESE PERSIMMON (Diospyrus Kaki, Diospyracea) HIS, the national fruit of Japan, is a giant compared. with the persimmon of the North American woods as regards the size of its fruit; the tree is a comparative dwarf but makes up in beauty, symmetry, and convenience of size what it lacks in height. It does not need the frost to sweeten its fruit but neither does the frost-touch prove harmful as to other semi-tropical fruits. There is as endless an array of variety in this persimmon as the apple can present and it is used by the Japanese in as many different ways and as constantly. The Japan persimmon varies so in size, flavour, and shape, from the size of a base-ball to that of the largest orange; from those somewhat tasteless and dry to a ravishingly delicious and juicy type; and from the rounding, through all degrees, to the extremely elongated that one can but generalise in dealing with it. It seems a great pity that it is not better known and appreciated in Northern markets, as it ships well, grows so readily and in such abundance that it is not the expensive fruit many of the semi-tropical products prove to be, and yet is one of the richest of fruits in food value. It can best perhaps be compared with the banana as to its type of riches and its practicability as "a whole meal" in itself. It has wealth of carbohydrates, also fat and protein, (with more sugar however), and its energy-producing power is about the same as the forceful banana.
It is susceptible of much more variation than is realised yet in even Florida and California, and its prodigal abundance might be indulged in not only more freely, with better results because of its substance, but farther north than it has yet been grown or shipped. It should be mentioned, however, that only the "chocolate" or dark-meated varieties, of which there are a number, should be used in cookery. Even where the others are perfectly ripe the chemical action of the heat brings out the astringent quality so actively that it is impossible to eat the results. The chocolate varieties may be used without any danger of the development of unpleasant qualities. The thoroughly ripe Northern persimmon in its sweet, sugary state, may be also used with great success with most of the recipes or suggestions given for the Japanese.
Two coconut sweets from a chapter written when a whole nut, not a can, was the starting point. The candy is a straightforward boiled-sugar confection; the mousse predates mechanical freezers and assumes a hand-crank churn packed with ice and salt.
- One coconut, in practiceA mature brown coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of grated meat and 1/2 to 1 cup of liquid from inside the shell. That liquid is coconut water, not the "cream" the second recipe calls for; the cream is pressed from the grated meat with hot water.
- Canned substitutesFor the candy, unsweetened canned coconut water plus unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut works, though desiccated coconut absorbs syrup faster and the mixture will stiffen sooner. For the mousse, full-fat canned coconut milk stands in for "the richest cocoanut cream and milk."
- The hinge: sugar temperature"Boil five or six minutes, add coconut, boil ten minutes longer" is a timing that only works on a specific stove. Use a thermometer and take the syrup to about 238-240F (soft-ball) before the coconut goes in, then cook to the same reading again after. Undercooked, it never sets no matter how long it sits.
- Forty-eight hoursThat long a rest suggests a batch cooked to the low end, left to dry rather than to set by crystallisation. A batch taken to soft-ball should be firm enough to cut much sooner. Score it into squares while still warm.
- Stirring after the sugar dissolvesNote that the original stirs continually only once the coconut is in. Before that, leave the syrup alone and wash sugar crystals down from the pan sides with a wet brush, or the candy turns grainy.
- Buttered platesShallow dinner plates or a buttered marble slab. A parchment-lined 8-inch square pan is easier and gives even thickness.
- The gelatine"A small tablespoon" of period granular gelatine is close to one modern envelope (2 1/4 teaspoons); it is there to keep the frozen mousse from turning icy rather than to set it. Bloom it in the two tablespoons of cold water, then warm it to dissolve before straining in.
- "Freeze"In this period that most often meant packing the mixture in a mould buried in ice and salt and leaving it to still-freeze, though a crank freezer could also be used. An ice cream machine gives a comparable result. Without either, freeze in a shallow pan and beat it thoroughly two or three times during freezing, or the texture goes coarse.
- YieldThe mousse makes one quart, as stated. The candy, from 1 1/2 lb sugar and one coconut, gives about 2 lb of finished sweets.
Boiled coconut-and-sugar candies of this kind are often said to be among the older confections of the sugar colonies, made anywhere the two crops grew side by side, and they travelled north with sugar itself; American cookbooks of the nineteenth century generally seem to treat coconut candy and coconut cream as domestic standards rather than novelties. This book belongs to a different moment: its coconut chapter argues the case for using the whole plant, milk, cream, meat and even the palm-cabbage, at a time when the northern market knew coconut chiefly as sweetened shreds in a box. The confident claim that a fresh nut suits "almost every form of frozen dainty" probably reflects the period's enthusiasm for ice-and-salt churning at home, which appears to have made frozen desserts a fairly routine part of the household repertoire rather than a confectioner's specialty.