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Cocoanut Cream Candy
1 tablespoon butter 3/4 cup milk 2 cups sugar 1/2 cup shredded cocoanut 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract Melt butter in saucepan; add milk and sugar; stir until sugar is dissolved, heating slowly; boil 12 to 15 minutes; remove from fire and add cocoanut and vanilla, beating until creamy. Pour into buttered tins and cool. For Chocolate Cocoanut Cream Candy add 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate to milk and other ingredients before boiling.
This is a small-batch coconut fudge, and like all fudge it is governed by temperature rather than the clock. The 12-to-15-minute boil is the weakest instruction in the recipe.
- Boil to a number, not a timeCook to 238F on a candy thermometer (soft-ball stage) rather than trusting 12 to 15 minutes, which depends entirely on your pan width and burner. Undercooked syrup gives a sauce that never sets; a few degrees over gives a hard, crumbly slab.
- Let it cool before beatingBeating a syrup that is still near boiling throws large sugar crystals and produces grainy candy. Take it off the heat, add the coconut and vanilla, and let it drop to about 110F before you beat it to the point where it loses its gloss.
- "Remove from fire"Standard period phrasing for taking the pan off the heat entirely, not for lowering the flame.
- CocoanutThe book means dried shredded coconut. Modern bagged sweetened flaked coconut will make the candy noticeably sweeter and wetter; unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut is probably the closer match, though sweetened packaged coconut was also on the market in this period.
- Buttered tinsAny small straight-sided pan will do. A buttered loaf pan or a 6-inch square pan gives a good depth for cutting into squares; an 8-inch square pan will produce thin candy from this quantity.
- Stir only until the sugar dissolvesOnce the syrup boils, leave it alone and wash any crystals off the pan sides with a wet pastry brush. Stirring a boiling sugar solution seeds crystallization early, which is exactly what the later beating is meant to control.
- The chocolate variationThree ounces of unsweetened chocolate is a substantial addition to two cups of sugar. Chop it so it melts before the syrup comes to temperature, and watch the pan closely, since cocoa solids scorch on the bottom well before sugar does.
- YieldAbout a pound, or roughly 20 to 25 small squares. It keeps a week in a tin between sheets of waxed paper.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of the promotional booklets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which sold cream of tartar baking powder and gave away recipe collections to keep its name in American kitchens. A candy chapter in such a book might be read as a sign of the times, when home confectionery was becoming a plausible domestic pastime rather than a specialist's trade. Shredded coconut belongs to the same story. Once dried and packaged coconut began arriving from firms processing imported nuts in the late nineteenth century, it turned up everywhere in American baking and candy-making, in macaroons, cream pies, and fudges like this one, precisely because it needed no cracking, no grating, and no hurry to use it up.