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Cocoanut Cream Candy
1½ cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 2 teaspoons butter 1/3 cup shredded cocoanut ½ teaspoon vanilla Put butter into granite saucepan; when melted, add sugar and milk, and stir until sugar is dissolved. Heat to boilingpoint, and boil twelve minutes; remove from fire, add cocoanut and vanilla, and beat until creamy and mixture begins to sugar slightly around edge of saucepan. Pour at once into a buttered pan, cool slightly, and mark in squares. One-half cup nut meat, broken in pieces, may be used in place of cocoanut.
This is a small-batch milk fondant, closer to penuche than to modern coconut bars. Everything depends on how far the syrup cooks and when you stop beating it.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwelve minutes of boiling was a workable guess on a coal range with a known pan; on a modern burner it can mean anything. The book gives no temperature, but the soft-ball stage, roughly 234-240F on a candy thermometer, is the likely target.
- Granite saucepan"Granite" means graniteware, enamelled sheet steel, not stone. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan; milk and sugar scorch readily in a thin one, and the pan should hold at least four times the volume of the syrup.
- CocoanutPeriod shredded coconut was generally unsweetened and fairly dry, sold packaged from the late nineteenth century. Unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut is the right substitute; sweetened flake will push an already sweet candy over the edge.
- The hinge is the beatingAdd the coconut and vanilla off the heat, then beat until the gloss dulls and the mixture just begins to grain at the edge of the pan. Beat too little and it never sets; beat past that point and it seizes in the saucepan rather than in the tin.
- Don't stir while it boilsStir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone. Stirring a boiling syrup seeds crystals early and gives a gritty candy instead of a smooth fondant.
- Pan and markingAn 8-by-4-inch loaf pan or similar small tin, buttered, gives a good depth. Score the squares while the candy is still warm and soft; once fully cold it breaks rather than cuts. The batch is small, so expect only a couple of dozen pieces depending on how you cut them.
- The stray line at the endThe trailing "2 cups sugar, 2/3 cup milk" appears to be a fragment of the following recipe's ingredient list. Ignore it and use the quantities given at the top.
- Nut variationThe half cup of broken nut meats replaces the coconut entirely. Walnuts or pecans, lightly toasted, turn the same base into a plain nut cream candy.
This belongs to the great age of American home candy-making, when a confectionery chapter was standard in a general cookbook and fondant, fudge and penuche were things a household made on a winter evening rather than bought. The spelling "cocoanut" was still usual in print through the turn of the century, often said to reflect a lingering confusion with cocoa; the ingredient itself only became an everyday pantry item once desiccated coconut was packed and shipped commercially, sold in packaged form from the 1880s, before which a cook had to crack and grate the nut herself. The recipe's structure is telling: it is really a plain milk fondant with two interchangeable flavourings, coconut or nuts, which is how these books handled variety without printing a separate page for each.