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Cocoanut Drops
Grate one cocoanut and weigh, adding half its weight in sugar. Mix this with a stiff-whipped white of egg and drop on buttered paper. Bake fifteen minutes in rather a quick oven.
A two-ingredient coconut macaroon, written when cooks bought whole nuts and grated them by hand. The proportions are given by weight, which makes the recipe easy to scale once you sort out the egg.
- The egg white is the ambiguous partThe recipe calls for one white, but a whole coconut yields more grated meat than a single white is likely to bind, so you may well need a second or a third. Add them one at a time until the mixture just holds a shape when dropped from a spoon.
- Fresh coconut, not the bagged kindGrated fresh coconut is moist and only mildly sweet, so half its weight in sugar goes a long way. Packaged sweetened flake may make the drops cloying; if you substitute, use unsweetened desiccated coconut and add a spoonful or two of water or cream to make up the lost moisture.
- Weigh, do not measureThe whole method rests on the 2:1 coconut-to-sugar ratio by weight. Volume measures are useless here because grated coconut packs unpredictably.
- Whip the white stiff, then foldBeat to firm peaks before combining, and fold rather than stir. Over-worked meringue collapses and the drops spread into thin wafers instead of standing up.
- Oven temperature"Rather a quick oven" in a period range means around 400F. Coconut and sugar scorch fast at that heat; modern practice bakes coconut macaroons at 325-350F, and at that temperature fifteen to twenty minutes is right. Watch for tips just browning.
- Buttered paperParchment does the job with no butter at all. Cool the drops on the paper for a few minutes before lifting, or the sugary bottoms tear.
- YieldA medium coconut, about 12 oz of grated meat, makes roughly three dozen teaspoon-sized drops. They keep several days in a tin and stale quickly if left uncovered.
Coconut macaroons are generally traced to the almond macaroon of European confectionery, in which nut, sugar and egg white are the whole of the formula; when cheap tropical imports reached American ports in quantity, coconut is often said to have simply taken the almond's place. Through most of the nineteenth century a cook who wanted grated coconut would ordinarily have had to buy the nut whole, crack it, pare the brown skin from the meat and grate it herself, which is likely why this recipe begins with grating and weighing rather than opening a package. Commercially dried and shredded coconut came to be sold in the United States over the course of the century, and its arrival is often credited with the flood of coconut cakes, pies and drops in household cookbooks of the following decades.