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Macaroons (Grated cocoanut its weight)
1 grated cocoanut 1/2 its weight in sugar 1/2 cup flour White of 1 egg Mix the cocoanut thoroughly with the sugar and flour; add the white of the egg, well beaten, and work the paste carefully. Roll it into balls the size of a nutmeg and lay them on buttered paper. Bake fifteen or twenty minutes in a slow oven.
A three-ingredient coconut macaroon written for a cook who bought whole coconuts and worked by weight. The proportions still work, but they assume fresh grated meat rather than the sweetened bagged product.
- Weigh the coconutOne medium coconut yields roughly 10-12 oz of grated meat, so "half its weight in sugar" comes to about 5-6 oz, or three-quarters of a cup up to a scant cup. Use a scale rather than guessing; the ratio is the whole recipe.
- Fresh coconut, not sweetened flakeGrated fresh coconut is moist and unsweetened. If you substitute bagged sweetened flake, the cookies will be cloying; unsweetened desiccated coconut is closer in sweetness, but soak it briefly in a little warm milk or water to restore moisture.
- One egg white may not bind itFresh coconut carries its own moisture and the single white the recipe calls for is enough. With drier modern coconut the paste may not come together, in which case a second white will help the balls hold their shape.
- A slow ovenNo temperature is given; a slow oven is generally taken as somewhere between about 275F and 325F. These are meant to dry and set to pale gold rather than brown; at a higher temperature the exposed shreds scorch before the centre firms.
- The size of a nutmegAbout an inch across, roughly two teaspoons of paste. Keep them uniform or the smaller ones will be hard while the larger are still damp inside.
- Buttered paperParchment, unbuttered, does the job better and releases cleanly. Silicone mats also work; a bare metal sheet does not, as the sugar welds the bottoms down.
- Yield and keepingThe number depends on the size of the coconut. They soften within a day in a covered tin; if you want them crisp, leave them in the turned-off oven to dry as it cools.
The macaroon began as an almond confection in Italy and France, the name generally traced through Italian maccherone, and reached English kitchens as a stiff paste of ground almonds, sugar and egg white. Coconut entered the formula in the nineteenth century, when American ports handled steady shipments of whole nuts from the Caribbean and Central America, and cooks found the grated meat behaved much like ground almonds in the paste. Because a coconut is not a standard unit, the coconut version tends to work by proportion rather than measure: you grate what the nut gives you and match it with half its weight in sugar. The instruction to bake on buttered paper in a slow oven belongs to the era of the wood or coal range, when the cooling oven after the day's baking was available for something that needed to dry more than cook.