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Coconut Drops
4 egg-whites
½ teaspoon lemon extract
½ pound powdered sugar
½ pound grated coconut
Beat the egg-whites stiff, add sugar and beat until light and white, then add the lemon extract, and enough coconut to make it as thick as can be easily stirred with a spoon. Drop on greased paper and bake at 350° F. for ten minutes.
A four-ingredient coconut macaroon, and unusually for a book of this vintage it gives an actual oven temperature. The main adjustments are the coconut itself and the bake time.
- The coconut is the variable"grated coconut" in the period could mean fresh coconut grated at home, unsweetened and quite moist, or the packaged desiccated product then coming onto the market. Modern desiccated unsweetened coconut is much drier and will drink up the meringue; sweetened bagged flake will make the drops cloying against half a pound of sugar. Use unsweetened medium-shred and judge by the instruction, not the weight.
- Weights to volumeHalf a pound of powdered sugar is about 2 cups, sifted. Half a pound of unsweetened shredded coconut is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups loosely packed, though the recipe tells you to stop at the consistency rather than the number.
- The hinge: "as thick as can be easily stirred"This is the whole recipe. The batter should hold a soft peak on the spoon and mound rather than spread when dropped. Too slack and the drops flatten into lace; too stiff and they bake dry and crumbly.
- Folding, not beatingHandling the coconut -- the recipe has you stir the coconut in with a spoon. A gentle hand helps: working the mixture hard knocks air out of the beaten whites and the drops come out flatter and chewier rather than light.
- Ten minutes is optimisticAt 350F, macaroons of any real size need 15 to 20 minutes to set through and take colour at the tips. Ten minutes suits very small drops only, or a hotter oven. Bake until the outsides are firm and lightly browned and the bottoms release cleanly.
- Greased paperThe original means paper, brown or plain kitchen paper, rubbed with grease. Parchment or a silicone mat needs no grease at all; ungreased foil will stick badly. Let the drops cool on the sheet a minute before lifting, or they tear.
- YieldFour egg whites at this ratio give several dozen small drops, depending on how large you spoon them. They keep two or three days in a tin.
Coconut drops belong to the wide family of meringue macaroons that spread through English and American baking in the nineteenth century as almonds, and later coconut, became cheap enough for ordinary households. Shredded coconut arrived in American kitchens on a commercial scale in the last quarter of the 1800s, when packaged desiccated coconut began to replace the labour of cracking, paring and grating a whole nut; recipes of this period often still say "grated," a holdover from when the cook did it herself. Recipes like this one, cheap, made from whites left over after a custard or a yellow cake, and requiring no creaming or rolling, are exactly the kind of small economy the household compendiums of the period were built around. The lemon extract looks like a period habit: a half teaspoon to cut the sweetness, perhaps because vanilla was the pricier bottle on the shelf, though the reasoning is inference rather than record.