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Cocoanut Caramels
One-quarter pound Baker's chocolate (half cake), one-quarter pound butter, two pounds nice brown sugar, one teacup rich milk. Stew half an hour or till thick. Add a grated cocoanut. Stir till it begins to boil again. Take from the fire, stir in a tablespoonful vanilla, and pour into buttered dishes. When cool enough to handle, make into balls, the size of a walnut and place on buttered dishes.--Mrs. S. T.
Cocoanut Caramels.
Pour a teacup of boiling milk over one-quarter cake of pounded chocolate. Let it steep an hour, then add one and one-quarter pounds of white sugar, and the milk of a cocoanut. Boil till perfectly done. Then remove from the fire, adding the grated cocoanut. Season with vanilla, pour in buttered dishes, and cut in blocks.--Mrs. W. C.
Two contributors' versions of the same sweet, printed back to back. Neither gives a temperature, so a candy thermometer is the single thing that turns these from guesswork into a reliable confection.
- Read it as two recipesMrs. S. T.'s version is a butter-and-brown-sugar caramel; Mrs. W. C.'s is a plain white-sugar candy with no butter at all, thinned with the water from inside the coconut. Pick one and follow it through rather than blending them.
- The hinge: cook to firm ballThe hinge: both "Stew half an hour or till thick" and "boil till perfectly done" leave the cook to judge by eye. For a chewy caramel, take the syrup to about 245-250F (firm ball); much below 240F it may not set, and cooked much hotter it goes hard and brittle.
- Baker's chocolateA quarter pound, or half a cake, is 4 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate — not modern semi-sweet. The sugar in the recipe assumes the chocolate brings none of its own.
- TeacupPeriod teacups run roughly 5 to 6 fl oz, smaller than a modern measuring cup. Six ounces of milk is a safe reading for both versions; the exact figure is not recoverable.
- A cocoanutOne fresh coconut grates out to about 3 to 4 cups. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works if you rehydrate it briefly in warm milk; sweetened bagged flake will push the candy far too sweet. "The milk of a cocoanut" in the second recipe means the thin water inside the shell, not canned coconut milk.
- Add coconut off the boilBoth versions put the coconut in at the very end for good reason — grated coconut releases water and oil, and prolonged boiling after it goes in makes the mass greasy and grainy.
- Buttered dishesButter a shallow pan generously. Mrs. S. T.'s is rolled into walnut-sized balls once cool enough to touch; Mrs. W. C.'s is cut into blocks — the recipe does not say when, but cutting while still warm and pliable avoids the cracking of a fully cold slab.
- YieldTwo pounds of sugar plus a coconut makes a large batch — likely 2 1/2 to 3 lb of candy, several dozen walnut-sized balls, depending on how much moisture cooks off. Halving is straightforward.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and usually dated 1878, gathers recipes from named and initialed contributors across the state, which is why the same sweet appears twice in a row in two hands with no attempt to reconcile them. "Caramel" in the 1870s American kitchen generally meant a boiled sugar-and-milk sweet cut into squares rather than the burnt-sugar sauce the word suggests now, and chocolate caramels appear to have been a relatively new commercial confection also being made at home. Whole coconuts reached Atlantic ports through the Caribbean trade and appear often enough in mid-century Southern recipe collections that writers assumed the reader would crack and grate one herself.