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Cocoanut Cream Candy
1 cocoanut--milk and meat. 1 1/2 lbs. sugar (3 cups). Put on sugar with milk from cocoanut; after it boils ten minutes add grated cocoanut and cook five minutes. Beat until it is cold, pour out on greased marble and cut in squares.
A two-ingredient fondant-style candy that depends entirely on sugar concentration, and the original gives times rather than temperatures. A thermometer settles it.
- "Milk" means the water insideThe liquid drained from a fresh coconut, not canned coconut milk. A single nut yields roughly 1/2 to 1 cup, which is the whole liquid content of the syrup — if yours gives less, top up with water to about 3/4 cup.
- Cook to a temperature, not a clockTen minutes plus five is meaningless across different pans and burners. Boil the sugar and coconut water to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F, and expect the grated meat to drop the temperature briefly when it goes in; bring it back to 238F before removing from the heat.
- Preparing the coconutDrain the liquid through a strainer, crack the shell, pry out the meat and pare off the brown skin before grating. One nut gives about 3 to 4 cups grated, roughly 10 oz.
- Beating is the hingeLet the syrup cool undisturbed to about 110F before beating. Stirring while it is hot throws large crystals and the candy turns grainy; beating a cooled syrup gives the fine crystal structure that makes it creamy and opaque.
- If you have no marbleA heavy rimmed baking sheet or a buttered 8-inch square pan works. Marble was valued because it pulls heat out fast, so chill a sheet pan in the refrigerator first if you want the same effect.
- Cut earlyScore the slab into squares while it is still warm and pliable. Once fully set it is harder to cut cleanly and the edges tend to crumble.
- YieldA generous batch, well over a pound of candy. It keeps a week in a tin between sheets of waxed paper, but dries out in the open air.
Mrs. Wilson's book belongs to the early 1920s, when Mary A. Wilson was writing for a Philadelphia newspaper audience fresh from wartime sugar and fat conservation; a candy section built on plain boiled sugar, with no butter, cream or corn syrup, may well reflect that moment. Whole coconuts had become a fairly common American grocery item by the late nineteenth century, as cheaper shipping from the Caribbean and Central America brought them within reach, and packaged shredded coconut followed. The method itself is straightforward fondant work: sugar boiled to soft ball, cooled, then beaten to force fine crystallization. The same technique underlies penuche and maple cream; British "cocoanut ice" is a related sugar-and-coconut sweet, though it is usually made with milk or condensed milk and is often tinted pink in one layer.