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Cocoanut Caramels, White and Red
1 pound of granulated sugar. 8 ounces of desiccated cocoanut. A small half cupful of water. Coloring.
Set the sugar and water over the fire in a small bright kettle and boil about 5 minutes, or till the syrup bubbles up thick and ropes from the spoon, and do not stir it. Then put in the cocoanut, stir to mix, and begin at once and drop the candy by table spoonfuls on a buttered baking pan. Reserve a few spoonfuls, make it hot again and color with cochineal and thin with a spoonful of water. Drop a spot of the red on each of the white caramels. Should the candy become set in the kettle before all is used it may be dissolved by adding a spoonful of water and setting it on the range again. When fresh grated cocoanut is used the sugar needs to be boiled to the candy point, or 3 or 4 minutes longer.
The yolk of an egg may be mixed with a portion of the candy instead of red coloring as above to make a yellow color, and melted chocolate added for another variety.
We set out white cakes, fruit cakes, pound and yeast raised cakes, but if we may judge by the criterion of the quantity used where people have free choice, sponge cake and the numerous varieties from the same mixture, all made without butter, hold the first place as favorites. Italian cakes is the general term for the class; diet bread cake is the fanciful name for sponge cake sometimes found in old-time cook-books. The loaf cakes of this sort, whether large or small, are not so good when stale, and in some large confectionaries having reputations to keep up, it is made a rule never to sell any over a day old over the counter, but such stock is disposed of at a reduced rate to small dealers.
The good quality of all these varieties depends upon the same precautions being observed as in the case of meringues and macaroons, just fully explained in the preceding columns.
A two-ingredient boiled-sugar drop candy of the 1890s confectionery trade, closer to a coconut macaroon than to what we now call caramel. The whole thing hinges on how far the syrup is boiled.
- Read the syrup, not the clock"boil about 5 minutes" depends entirely on your pan and burner. Go by the recipe's own test, the syrup thickening and roping from the spoon; the extra 3-4 minutes called for with fresh grated coconut takes it further along to compensate for the water the fresh meat carries. A thermometer helps if you want repeatability, but the book gives no number.
- Do not stirThe instruction is not fussiness. Agitating a boiling sugar syrup seeds crystallization and the batch turns grainy. Wash any grains off the sides of the pan with a wet brush instead, and swirl if you must move it.
- "A small half cupful of water"Roughly 3 to 3 1/2 fl oz. The exact amount matters little since it all boils off; what matters is the final temperature.
- The kettleA "small bright kettle" is a clean tinned-copper or heavy-bottomed saucepan, not a modern tea kettle. Bright meant polished and unstained. Any heavy 2-quart pan works.
- Desiccated cocoanutPeriod desiccated coconut was unsweetened shredded dried coconut. Modern sweetened flake will make the candy cloying and slightly softer; buy unsweetened. Eight ounces by weight is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups.
- CochinealSold then as a liquid tincture of crushed cochineal insects; the same colorant survives on labels as carmine or E120. Any red food coloring gives the same effect, added to the reserved portion only.
- Working fastThe mass sets in the pan within a couple of minutes. Have the buttered pan ready before the coconut goes in, and use two spoons to push the drops off. The reheat-with-a-spoonful-of-water fix works, but each reheating darkens the sugar.
- The egg-yolk variationA raw yolk stirred into candy that has already fallen below about 160F will not be cooked through. Add it only to a portion still hot from the fire, or use a yellow coloring.
- YieldThe recipe gives no count; expect somewhere around three dozen tablespoon-sized drops. They keep a few days in a tin but stale quickly once the coconut dries out.
- The last paragraphEverything from "We set out white cakes" onward belongs to the book's running commentary on sponge cakes and has nothing to do with the caramels. Ignore it as instruction.
American confectioners of the 1880s and 90s used "caramel" loosely for any small squared or dropped boiled-sugar sweet, not only for the milk-and-butter chew the word now brings to mind, and this recipe is really a coconut drop of the kind sold by weight from a shop tray. It could only have become a staple after desiccated coconut arrived as a cheap packaged grocery: shredded, dried coconut was being manufactured on a large scale in the United States from the 1880s and 90s onward, which put a tropical ingredient within reach of every bakeshop and made the older instruction to grate the fresh nut an alternative rather than the rule. The white drop spotted with red is pure counter display, the trade's habit of selling color as much as flavor, and the red came from cochineal, the insect dye that was the standard confectioner's red until coal-tar colors displaced it. The stray paragraph about sponge cake tacked onto the end is a reminder that books like this were assembled from newspaper columns written for working pastry cooks, where the shop economics of day-old stock mattered as much as the formula.