Home › Recipes › Cocoanut Cream Squares
Cocoanut Cream Squares
1 pound granulated sugar. 8 ounces cocoanut either fresh grated or desiccated. 1 small half cupful water.
Set the sugar and water over the fire in a small bright-kettle and boil about 5 minutes, or until the syrup bubbles up thick and ropes from the spoon, and do not stir it. Then put in the cocoanut, stir to mix, and when it begins to look white pour it immediately into a shallow tin pen. As soon as it is set solid mark it off, and cut in little squares when cold. The same kind may be colored red, and also be made with chocolate.
This is a fondant-style coconut candy: sugar syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, stirred until it grains, and poured out to set. The whole thing hinges on reading the syrup correctly, so a candy thermometer is worth more here than the five-minute timing.
- The stage that matters"Bubbles up thick and ropes from the spoon" describes a syrup boiled well past thread, in the region of what is now called soft ball (about 238-240F), though the phrase is too loose to pin to a single degree. Five minutes is only a rough guide; judge by the syrup, not the clock, or the squares will either weep syrup or set hard and crumbly.
- Do not stir the syrupThe instruction is literal and important. Agitating a hot sugar syrup seeds premature crystallisation and gives a coarse, gritty candy. Wash any crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush instead.
- "When it begins to look white"After the coconut goes in, keep stirring until the mixture loses its gloss and turns opaque and creamy; the recipe does not specify whether this is done on or off the heat. That clouding is the sugar crystallising, and it happens fast; once it starts, pour at once or the mass will stiffen in the pan.
- Bright-kettleProbably no more than a clean, brightly polished metal pan (copper or tin-lined were the usual confectioners' choices). Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works, ideally one with a light-coloured interior so you can see the syrup's colour.
- A small half cupfulRead this as a scant half cup, around 100 ml. The exact amount is not critical since the water boils off; how you read the syrup governs the result.
- CoconutDesiccated coconut here means unsweetened dried coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind sold for baking. Sweetened flake will throw the sugar balance off and brown more readily. Fresh grated coconut carries more moisture and gives a softer square that keeps only a few days.
- The pan and the marking"Shallow tin pen" is a typo for pan; an 8-inch square tin, lightly oiled or lined, gives squares about half an inch thick. Score the surface into a grid while the candy is warm and still soft, then cut through on the lines once cold.
- The variationsFor chocolate, an ounce or two of melted unsweetened chocolate worked in with the coconut is a reasonable modern reading; the recipe gives no quantity. The red was most likely cochineal, the standard confectioner's red of the period; a few drops of modern gel colour added to the syrup before it grains does the same job.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 pounds of candy, roughly five dozen one-inch squares. Store airtight; they stale as they dry out.
Coconut candy of this type was common on American confectioners' counters in the later nineteenth century, as desiccated coconut became cheap and shelf-stable. "Cocoanut" was the usual English spelling for much of that period, apparently by analogy with cocoa, and fell out of use in the twentieth century. The recipe belongs to a family of grained-sugar sweets - fudge, penuche, maple cream, coconut ice - that all depend on boiling syrup to soft ball and then forcing it to crystallise finely. The pink-and-white layering familiar from coconut ice is a related treatment of the same mixture.