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Old-Fashioned Cocoanut Creams
Boil two cups of granulated sugar and two-thirds cup of water. When boiling rapidly, add one-eighth teaspoon of cream of tartar. Cook until it will form a soft ball if dropped into cold water. Take from fire, and add one cup of Larkin Shredded Cocoanut and one-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla or Orange Flavoring Extract. Drop upon waxed paper.
A plain boiled-sugar confection of the fondant family, written for a cook who already knew what a sugar syrup should look like at each stage. Two things the text leaves unsaid will decide whether it sets.
- Soft ball, in numbersThe soft-ball stage is 235-240F on a candy thermometer. Test the cold-water way as a check: the drop should flatten between your fingers rather than hold a firm bead.
- The hinge: stir it to a creamThe recipe stops at "drop upon waxed paper," but dropped straight from the pan the syrup is unlikely to set as a cream on its own. Most drops of this type were stirred off the heat, after the coconut and flavoring go in, until the mixture loses its shine and begins to thicken, then dropped quickly before it stiffens in the pan.
- Cream of tartarThe eighth teaspoon is not seasoning. It inverts a little of the sucrose so the candy crystallizes fine and smooth instead of grainy. Do not leave it out, and do not add more, or the creams will stay tacky.
- Larkin ingredientsLarkin Shredded Cocoanut and Larkin extracts were house-brand goods sold by the company that issued the book. Use one cup of unsweetened shredded coconut and half a teaspoon of vanilla or orange extract. Sweetened bagged coconut will push an already very sweet candy over the edge.
- Don't stir while it boilsOnce the sugar dissolves, leave the syrup alone and wash any crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush. Stirring a boiling syrup seeds crystallization early and produces a sandy candy.
- HumidityFondant-type creams absorb moisture from the air. On a damp day they will stay sticky no matter how accurate the temperature; make them when the kitchen is dry.
- Yield and keepingSeveral dozen small drops, depending on size. Let them firm at room temperature for an hour or two, then store airtight between sheets of waxed paper; they keep about a week and are best in the first few days.
Boiled-sugar creams like these belong to the great age of American home candy-making, when granulated sugar had become cheap and reliable enough that a household could turn out fondant without a confectioner's training. The coconut is the giveaway for the period: shredded and desiccated coconut, packed dry in tins and packets, reached ordinary kitchens in the later nineteenth century and made a tropical ingredient into a pantry staple, turning up in cakes, pies, macaroons and candies alike. The branded ingredients here are worth noticing too. Recipes that name a company's own shredded coconut and flavoring extract were promotional writing as much as instruction, published to keep those particular tins moving through mail-order and club-plan sales, and the spelling "cocoanut" was still the ordinary printed form well into the twentieth century.