Home › Frozen Dishes › Cocoanut Candy
Cocoanut Candy
2 cups sugar ½ cup cream 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup cocoanut Cook sugar and cream twelve minutes; add butter and cocoanut. Pour into greased pans, crease, and cool. 2 cups molasses 2 tablespoons butter
A plain boiled-sugar candy of the sort that filled the back pages of confectioners' cookbooks. The instructions assume you already know what a sugar syrup looks like at the soft-ball stage; the twelve-minute timing is the least reliable thing here.
- Ignore the twelve minutes, use a thermometerBoiling time depends on pan width, heat and humidity, and twelve minutes is only a rough guide for the author's own stove. Cook the sugar and cream to about 238F (soft ball); taken much beyond that the candy will set noticeably firmer and drier.
- "Cocoanut"Period spelling for coconut, and at this date it could mean either freshly grated meat or dried shredded coconut. Modern sweetened flake will push an already sweet candy over the edge; use unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut.
- CreamCream at this date varied a good deal in richness. Use heavy or whipping cream here; half-and-half or milk will not give the same body.
- Add the butter off the heatThe recipe says to add butter and coconut after cooking, so take the pan off the burner before stirring them in.
- "Crease"Score the surface into squares with a buttered knife while the candy is still soft, so it breaks cleanly once set. Cutting a fully cooled slab of this sort tends to shatter it.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square pan, buttered, gives a slab about half an inch thick and roughly 36 pieces. Store airtight; it stales and dries within a few days.
- The stray last line"2 cups molasses 2 tablespoons butter" appears to be the opening of the next recipe rather than part of this one. Do not add molasses to the coconut candy.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it ran well beyond its sponsor's product into general household cookery. Coconut candy of this type belongs to the great American age of home confectionery, when cheap refined cane sugar and the arrival of commercially packaged desiccated coconut, generally traced to the later nineteenth century, put candy-making within reach of any kitchen with a heavy pan. Before that, coconut reached households as a whole nut to be cracked and grated by hand; the shredded product sold in tins and packets is what made recipes this brief possible, since the writer could simply call for "1 cup cocoanut" and expect to be understood. The absence of a thermometer reading is typical of the period, when cooks were expected to judge doneness by dropping syrup into cold water rather than by degrees.