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Cocoa Cocoanut Cookies
3 eggs 1 cup sugar cup heavy cream ½ cup shredded cocoanut cup Lowney's Always Ready
The transcription preserves only the ingredient list, and two of the quantities have lost their fractions in the printing. Treat this as a starting point rather than a set of directions.
- Missing quantitiesThe amounts for the heavy cream and the Lowney's Always Ready have not survived the transcription. A half cup of each would suit three eggs and a cup of sugar, but that is inference, not the original text.
- No method is givenThe transcription carries the ingredient list only. Nothing here tells you whether the eggs are whipped whole, separated, or simply beaten into the sugar.
- Lowney's Always ReadyA ready-mixed cocoa preparation sold by the Walter M. Lowney Company, apparently sweetened and intended to be made up without boiling. It is long gone; cocoa powder is the nearest substitute, and if the original was indeed sweetened the sugar here will no longer be balanced against it.
- CocoanutPeriod spelling of coconut. Shredded coconut of the era was typically dried and unsweetened, drier and coarser than the moist sweetened flake sold today, which will make the batter noticeably sweeter and wetter.
- Batter without flourThere is no flour, butter or leavening here, though the heavy cream supplies some fat. The mixture is bound by egg and coconut rather than by a creamed dough, and is closer in character to a macaroon.
- YieldThree eggs and a cup of sugar make roughly two dozen small drop cookies.
The Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston was one of the large American chocolate manufacturers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Lowney's Cook Book belongs to a genre of promotional cookery writing in which a manufacturer paid for a full general cookbook in order to place its own products inside the recipes. That is why a cookie recipe calls for a branded preparation by name rather than for cocoa: "Always Ready" is said to have been a sweetened cocoa mixture the company sold for making drinking chocolate without boiling. Shredded coconut appears constantly in American desserts of this period because commercially dried and packaged coconut had become cheap and shelf-stable in the decades after the 1880s, turning what had been an awkward tropical import into a pantry staple. "Cocoanut" was a common English spelling well into the twentieth century.