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Candies and Candy Making: Cocoanut
Cocoanut Marshmallow Bonbons. -Cut fresh marshmallows into quarters or any desired shape, dip in melted fondant, roll in grated cocoanut, and set on waxed paper to hard- The fondant may be of various tints and flavors for variety. Use if possible fresh coarsely grated cocoanut, as if too fine it will not adhere well to the fondant. Or desiccated cocoanut may be used, if necessary, but is not equally good.
Cocoanut Maple Bonbons.-Grate fine 1 fresh cocoanut and stir it into a pound of soft maple cream or fondant. Mix the mass with the hands until thoroughly incorporated. Roll and cut out with a small candy cutter, roll into round balls with the palms, let stand to harden slightly, and dip in cream fondant or chocolate as preferred.
Cocoanut Strawberry Bonbons.- To 1 freshly grated cocoanut add about four times as much, by bulk, stiff fondant, mix thoroughly with the hands, and mold into conical shapes the size of strawberries.
When dry dip into melted fondant flavored with strawberry and tinted pink. Afterwards roll in red sugar sand.
Maple Bonbons. - Use maple sugar instead of granulated to make a cream or fondant in the usual manner.
Or use part maple sugar and part granulated sugar. Form this fondant, when of a soft and creamy consistency, into any desired shape, let stand to harden, dip in melted cream or fondant, and place on waxed paper to harden.
Jelly Cream Bonbons.-Obtain a starch tray having molds with two sections, one smaller than the other.
Cook a suitable quantity of apple jelly to a stiff consistency, and with this by means of a funnel fill one half of the mold. Let cool and fill the remainder of the mold with the melted. fondant of the consistency of ordinary cream. A variety of different tints and flavors and molds of different shapes and sizes may be used to produce different effects.
Pineapple Bonbons. - Dip in melted fondant pineapples cut into fancy shapes and place on waxed paper to harden.
Walnut Bonbons. -Mix equal parts of chopped black walnuts with a soft fondant, mold to any desired shape, dip in chocolate, maple or cream fondant and arrange on waxed paper to harden.
A set of variations on one technique: a fondant center, a dip in melted fondant, and a coating. Everything depends on the fondant being warmed correctly, so start there.
- Melted fondant is the hingeFondant is not melted like chocolate; it is softened over a water bath until it just flows, roughly 100-110F, thinned with a spoonful of hot water or sugar syrup if needed. Take it much above that and it will set dull, streaked and grainy instead of smooth and satiny.
- "Cream" means fondantThroughout this section "cream," "cream fondant" and "maple cream" all mean cooked fondant, not dairy. Maple cream here is fondant made with maple sugar, not the spreadable maple butter sold under that name today.
- Fresh coconutOne coconut yields about 3 to 4 cups of coarse gratings. The point about coarseness is real: fine desiccated shreds pack into a dust that slides off the wet fondant, while coarse curls catch and stay. If you use packaged sweetened flake, it is sweeter and wetter than what the book assumes.
- Sugar sand"Red sugar sand" is coarse colored sanding sugar, the kind used on cookies. Apply it while the dipped coating is still tacky.
- The starch trayA commercial starch tray: a tray of dried cornstarch into which mould impressions were stamped by dies. A shallow pan filled an inch deep with cornstarch, dried in a low oven and cooled, then dimpled with the rounded end of a wooden spoon, approximates it, though it will not give the two-section mould the recipe describes. Brush the starch off the finished pieces with a soft brush.
- Apple jelly "cooked to a stiff consistency"This means reducing it until it sets firmly on a cold plate, which takes a candy-thermometer eye rather than a clock. Modern pectin-set jellies scorch and thin out if pushed hard; a stiff pate de fruit or a jelly cooked to about 224F behaves better in the mold.
- Pineapple bonbonsThese are almost certainly candied or glace pineapple rather than fresh; fresh fruit weeps, and a fondant coating on it will soften and slide.
- Black walnutsGenuine black walnuts, not English walnuts, and their flavor is much stronger and more resinous. They are sold shelled in pieces; substituting Persian walnuts gives a milder, quite different candy.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield; a pound of fondant with a grated coconut will make several dozen small bonbons. Store them in a single layer between waxed paper in a cool, dry place; refrigeration makes fondant sweat and the coatings go sticky.
Bonbon is simply the French nursery word for something good, and by the late nineteenth century it had come to mean a small fondant-centered sweet finished by hand-dipping, the stock in trade of the American confectioner's shop. This section reads like a shop manual adapted for the household, which is exactly what many of these compilations were: the starch tray, the funnel, the candy cutter and the dipping fondant are all professional equipment, offered to a home cook. Coconut is generally said to have reached eastern American cities in quantity with the steamship trade, and commercially desiccated coconut was available too, which is why the author can treat it as an inferior but available fallback. The maple and black walnut variations point the other way, toward domestic ingredients not typically associated with French confectionery, and mark the recipes as American in a way the borrowed name does not.