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Cocoanut Caramels
One and one-half pounds white sugar, ½ cup sweet milk, boil together 10 minutes; add about 1 pint grated cocoanut, boil 10 minutes more; pour out on buttered dish; when cool cut into bars.
A two-stage boiled milk-and-sugar candy, closer to what we would call fudge or a milk caramel than to a modern chewy caramel. The original gives times instead of temperatures, which is the one thing worth correcting.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTen minutes plus ten minutes is meaningless across different pans and burners; the same syrup can land anywhere from soft-ball to burnt. Use a thermometer and take the second boil to about 245F for bars firm enough to cut, or 238-240F for something softer and fudgier.
- Quantities in modern termsOne and a half pounds of white sugar is roughly 3⅓ to 3½ cups. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk as opposed to soured or buttermilk.
- A pint of grated cocoanutThis is a volume measure of freshly grated coconut meat, around 5 to 6 ounces, which is part of a medium coconut rather than a whole one. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened bagged flake will push the candy noticeably sweeter, so cut the sugar back accordingly.
- The pan mattersMilk and sugar scorch readily once the water has boiled off. Use a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture, since it climbs, and stir along the bottom through the second boil.
- Buttered dishAn 8-inch square pan, buttered generously, gives bars about half an inch thick. Line it with parchment first if you want to lift the slab out whole.
- Cut while warm"When cool" is optimistic: fully cold, this sets hard enough to crack rather than slice. Score it into bars while still warm and slightly tacky, then break along the lines once set.
- YieldAbout 1¾ pounds of candy, roughly three dozen small bars. It keeps a week or more in a tin between layers of waxed paper.
Coconut candy of this kind is generally traced to the American community cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, by which time imported coconuts had become cheap enough at the grocer's to be an ordinary household ingredient rather than a novelty. The word "caramel" was used loosely in period books for almost any boiled sugar sweet cut into squares or bars, including milk-based ones that contained no caramelised sugar at all and never darkened past ivory. Grating a coconut by hand was tedious work, which is part of why shredded and desiccated coconut sold in packets later found such a quick market; recipes like this one, calling simply for "grated cocoanut," belong to the period before that trade was established.