Home › Recipes › Cocoanut Candy
Cocoanut Candy
Turn to receipt number 222, take the same ingredients and boil the candy to a degree a little nearer the brittle stage; take it from the fire and put in 1 pound of fresh grated cocoanut. Stir rapidly to thoroughly mix, then pour the candy thinly in a buttered dish. When using desiccated cocoanut which has no moisture to reduce the candy to thinness boil the candy only to the point named in the first receipt and the same as for cream candies.
A one-paragraph variation on an earlier cream-candy formula, written for a cook who already has the base recipe in front of him. The whole thing turns on how far past the cream stage you take the syrup, and that depends on which coconut you use.
- The missing base recipeEverything here is a modification of receipt 222, which is not on this page. Without it you do not know the ingredients or proportions, nor what "the point named in the first receipt" actually was. Read the two together or the instructions are unusable.
- What "nearer the brittle stage" meansThe book gives no temperatures. By modern figures, cream candies are boiled to about the soft-to-firm ball range (roughly 238-250F), while the brittle or hard-crack stage begins around 300F. "A little nearer" means a few degrees higher than the base recipe, not a jump to brittle. Use a thermometer and note the base recipe's figure before you start.
- Fresh coconut adds waterThis is the hinge. Freshly grated coconut carries a great deal of moisture, which thins the hot syrup on contact; boiling a few degrees further compensates. Desiccated coconut adds none, so the extra boiling would set the candy up hard and short.
- CocoanutSimply the older spelling of coconut. One pound of fresh grated meat is roughly the yield of one to two mature coconuts; a pound of unsweetened desiccated coconut is somewhere around five to seven cups loosely packed, depending on the cut.
- Work fast off the heatOnce the coconut goes in, the mass cools and thickens quickly. Have the buttered dish ready and warm, and pour before the candy begins to grain in the pan.
- "Thinly" and cuttingThe recipe asks only for a thin sheet in a buttered dish. Score it into squares while still warm and pliable; a fully set coconut candy shatters rather than cuts.
- HumiditySugar work at this stage pulls moisture from the air. On a damp day the candy will stay tacky no matter how carefully you boiled it, so pick a dry one and store the pieces airtight.
- YieldNot stated, and it cannot be worked out without receipt 222, since the size of the base batch is unknown. Whatever that batch weighs, add a pound for the coconut.
Coconut candy of this kind belongs to the late nineteenth-century American confectioner's repertoire. Commercial drying and shredding of coconut in the United States dates from roughly the 1890s, which brought shelf-stable "desiccated" coconut within reach of grocers and bakers; before that a cook wanting coconut generally had to buy whole nuts, crack them and grate the meat by hand. This receipt gives two boiling points because the author is writing both for cooks who might still be grating a wet fresh nut and for those buying the dry product, and he understands that the difference is water. The book is arranged as a numbered series of receipts, which is what allows a variation like this one to be written in three sentences by pointing back to a master formula.