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Cocoanut Cream Candy
1 1/2 cups sugar 2 teaspoons butter 1/2 cup milk 1/3 cup shredded cocoanut 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Put butter into granite saucepan; when melted, add sugar and milk, and stir until sugar is dissolved. Heat to boiling-point, and boil twelve minutes; remove from fire, add cocoanut and vanilla, and beat until creamy and mixture begins to sugar slightly around edge of saucepan. Pour at once into a buttered pan, cool slightly, and mark in squares. One-half cup nut meat, broken in pieces, may be used in place of cocoanut.
A small-batch stovetop fudge of the old school, cooked to the soft-ball stage and beaten hot. The whole outcome rests on how far the syrup boils and how it is beaten afterwards.
- The twelve minutes is a stand-in for a temperatureWhat the recipe wants is the soft-ball stage, 236-240F on a candy thermometer. Twelve minutes at a hard boil in a wide pan will overshoot; in a narrow one it may fall short. Go by the thermometer and treat the clock as a rough guide.
- Granite saucepanGranite ware is enamelled steel, thin and prone to scorching. Use a heavy-bottomed pan of two to three times the volume of the mixture, since the milk and sugar climb sharply when they boil.
- Dissolve the sugar completely firstStir over moderate heat until no grit can be felt on the pan bottom, and wash any crystals from the sides with a wet brush before the boil begins. Stray crystals at this point are what turn the finished candy sandy rather than creamy.
- Beating hot gives a coarse candyThis recipe has you beat straight off the fire, which produces the slightly grainy, old-fashioned texture the words "begins to sugar slightly" describe. For a smoother, modern fudge crumb, let the syrup stand undisturbed until it drops to about 110F before beating.
- CocoanutShredded coconut of this period was generally sold unsweetened, and drier than most bagged coconut today. Use unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut; sweetened flake will push an already sweet candy further and soften the set.
- Add the flavouring off the heatVanilla goes in after the pan leaves the fire, as written, or the alcohol carries most of the aroma off. The same holds for the nuts in the variation.
- Pan and yieldThis makes roughly three-quarters of a pound, enough for a buttered loaf pan or half of an 8-inch square tin lined with parchment. Mark the squares while the surface is still warm; once cold it fractures rather than cuts.
- StorageKeep in an airtight tin with a layer of waxed paper between the squares. It dries and hardens within a few days in open air.