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Cocoanut Cream Cookies
2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 cup thick cream ½ cup shredded cocoanut 3 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt Beat eggs until light, add sugar gradually, cocoanut, cream, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder and salt. Chill thoroughly, toss on a floured board, pat, and roll one-half inch thick. Sprinkle with cocoanut, roll onefourth inch thick, and shape with a small round cutter, first dipped in flour. Bake on a buttered sheet in a moderate oven.
A soft, cake-like rolled cookie that depends entirely on the dough being cold. Fannie Farmer gives no temperature, no time and no yield, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Oven temperatureFarmer gives none; "a moderate oven" is conventionally read as about 350-375F. Rolled a quarter inch thick, small rounds want roughly 8 to 12 minutes, until the edges are just colored and the tops still pale.
- Chill it properlyThis is the hinge. A dough with a cup of cream and no butter is slack and sticky at room temperature; give it at least an hour in the refrigerator, and work with half at a time while the rest stays cold.
- Thick creamPeriod "thick cream" is heavy or whipping cream, roughly 36% fat, unwhipped. Light cream or half-and-half will give a wetter dough that needs more flour and bakes up tougher.
- CocoanutThe coconut of 1896 was unsweetened dried shredded coconut, drier and less sugary than modern sweetened flaked. If you use sweetened flaked, cut the sugar to about three-quarters of a cup; if you use unsweetened, the recipe works as written.
- The double rollRolling to half an inch, sprinkling with coconut, then rolling down to a quarter inch presses the coconut into the surface of the dough rather than leaving it loose on top. Press the sprinkled coconut in lightly before the second pass or it will scatter.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt with a cup of sugar reads as balanced, not salty, provided it is fine table salt. Coarse kosher salt needs more by volume - about half again for Morton, closer to double for Diamond Crystal.
- Baking sheet"Buttered sheet" is fine, but parchment is easier with a soft, sticky dough and removes the risk of the coconut on the underside scorching.
- YieldFarmer gives none, and a batch built on three cups of flour will run well past three dozen small rounds. They are best the day they are baked; the cream keeps them soft but they stale quickly.
Coconut arrived in American home kitchens in quantity in the late nineteenth century, when commercially shredded and dried coconut, sold in packets, replaced the labor of cracking and grating a whole nut. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book spells it "cocoanut," a common variant of the period that survived into the twentieth century before standardizing as "coconut." The recipe also belongs to a family of cream cookies that turn up in American cookbooks of the era: no butter at all, the fat supplied by cream.