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Sherried Cocoanut
Grate a fresh cocoanut and drop into a thick syrup made of four cups of sugar to two of water, and cook gently for forty minutes. When done remove from the fire and immediately stir in the beaten yolks of three eggs. These should thicken a little with the beating and heat. Add a wineglassful of sherry, whip well and cool. (The eggs may be stirred in while still on stove but should never be allowed to boil.)
A sweetmeat rather than a dessert course: sugar syrup, fresh coconut, egg yolks for body and sherry for perfume. Two things decide whether it works — the state of the syrup and how the yolks go in.
- The hinge: temper the yolksWhisk a ladleful of the hot syrup into the beaten yolks first, then return the mixture to the pan, rather than dropping cold yolks into a full pot of near-boiling sugar. Done the other way round the yolks scramble into threads on contact, and the recipe's own warning that they must never boil comes too late.
- Cook the yolks properlyThe syrup should still be very hot when the yolks go in, so that the mixture reaches at least 160F/71C and holds there briefly; if it has cooled, the eggs are effectively raw. Pasteurized yolks are the simple answer for anyone serving this to children, the elderly or the immune-compromised, since the finished sweet is never cooked again.
- A wineglassfulIn American books of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Use a dry oloroso or amontillado; cream sherry will push an already very sweet confection over.
- The syrupFour cups of sugar to two of water simmered forty minutes will reduce a good deal and thicken considerably, but the exact stage it reaches cannot be read off the text. Pan width, how gently it simmers and how much water the wet grated coconut gives up all change the timing, so judge by thickness rather than by the clock.
- Fresh coconutOne medium coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated, about 12 oz of meat. Frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; dried sweetened flake is not, as it is drier and already sugared, and will make the finished sweet cloying and stringy.
- Cooling and whipping"Whip well and cool" means beating as it cools, which keeps the sugar from setting in coarse crystals and lightens the texture. Beat in the pan off the heat, or transfer to a bowl set over cold water and keep the whisk moving until it thickens.
- Yield and servingThe quantities are generous: four cups of sugar and a whole coconut make a good deal of sweet, enough for a number of small servings. The recipe gives no instruction on how it was served. Being heavily sugared, it will keep covered in the refrigerator for a few days.
Coconut sweets of this type belong to a family that runs from the Iberian and Latin American cocada and doce de coco — grated coconut boiled in heavy syrup, often enriched with egg yolk — through the Caribbean and into American cookery. The egg-yolk-and-syrup technique is the same one behind Portuguese convent sweets, and the sherry finish suggests a table sweet rather than a nursery one. Fresh coconuts reached northern American markets in growing numbers through the second half of the nineteenth century as Caribbean shipping expanded, and cookbooks of the period carry instructions for cracking, paring and grating them by hand.