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Cocoanut Sandwiches
Make cream dressing, let cool. Add cocoanut freshly grated, put between sweet or crisp wafers.
A two-line sweet sandwich from the era when "sandwich" covered anything spread between two thin things, wafers included. Everything depends on the dressing being fully cold before the coconut goes in.
- "Cream dressing"In cookbooks of this period this generally means a cooked dressing: milk or cream thickened with flour and egg yolk over hot water, sweetened, sometimes with a little butter. It is not whipped cream and not mayonnaise. Cook it until it coats a spoon, then chill it completely, or the wafers soften into paste within minutes.
- CocoanutSimply the older spelling of coconut. "Freshly grated" means from the nut itself. Packaged sweetened flake is much wetter and much sweeter; if you use it, cut the sugar in the dressing and chop the shreds finer so they do not push the wafers apart.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. A workable ratio is about half a cup of grated coconut to a cup of cooled dressing "
Sweet sandwiches on wafers belong to the tea table rather than the lunch box, and sandwich chapters of this period often treat the form as a construction method rather than a category of savory food: anything spread between two flat surfaces qualified. Coconut reached American kitchens whole and hairy well before it arrived in bags; grating one by hand was ordinary work, and recipe books of the 1910s and 1920s often specify "freshly grated cocoanut" to distinguish it from the desiccated and sweetened packaged versions. The cooked "cream dressing" is a relative of the boiled salad dressing that predates widespread commercial mayonnaise, sweetened here and pressed into service as a filling.