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Cocoanut Creams
3 C sugar 2 T butter 1½ C milk 1/4 t cream of tartar ¾ C shredded cocoanut ¼ t vanilla Mix sugar and milk and bring to a boil; then add cream of tartar Remove from fire, add butter, cocoanut, Drop from spoon to oiled paper.
Ruth W. Nicholas. and cook to a very soft ball. vanilla and beat until creamy. 3 C sugar 1 C sweet milk
A boiled fondant candy of the kind that filled church-cookbook sweet sections: sugar syrup cooked to soft ball, then beaten until it grains into a creamy, opaque mass. The instructions here are printed out of sequence, so read the order carefully before you start.
- Working orderCombine sugar and milk, bring to a boil, add the cream of tartar, and cook undisturbed to a very soft ball. Off the heat add butter, coconut and vanilla, beat until creamy and thick, then drop from a spoon onto oiled paper.
- Soft ball, in numbersA "very soft ball" sits at the low end of the soft-ball range, roughly 234-238F on a candy thermometer; the recipe itself names no temperature. Cooked much past the soft-ball range, the finished creams come out firmer and drier rather than fudge-like.
- Quantities that lost their fractionsThe coconut is three-quarters of a cup and the vanilla a quarter teaspoon; the printed "34" and "14" are the fraction marks worn away. The cream of tartar is a quarter teaspoon.
- What the cream of tartar doesIt inverts a little of the sugar during boiling so the candy sets fine-grained and creamy instead of gritty. Don't increase it: too much invert sugar leaves the mass slow to firm, or soft.
- CocoanutPackaged shredded or desiccated coconut of this period was typically unsweetened and fairly dry. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will work but pushes the candy noticeably sweeter; unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut is closer to the original.
- Beating is the hingeLet the syrup cool a few minutes before beating, then beat steadily until it loses its gloss and thickens. Stop the moment it holds a soft mound on the spoon, or it will set in the pan before you can portion it.
- YieldThree cups of sugar gives roughly 40 to 50 small creams, depending on spoon size. They keep about a week in a tin with waxed paper between layers.
Coconut creams belong to the great age of American home candy-making, when a boiled sugar syrup beaten to a fondant was as routine a kitchen skill as making pie crust. Shredded coconut, shipped dried from the tropics and sold cheaply in packets from the 1890s onward, turned up in cakes, pies, and above all in confections, where its chewy texture broke up the sweetness of plain fondant. The techniques were closely related: the same boiled-and-beaten sugar mass, stopped a little earlier, becomes a poured icing, and church cookbook compilers grouped recipes by technique as often as by course. Like most entries in books of this sort, it carries the name of the woman who contributed it, which was the whole point of the exercise.