Snow Flakes
Grate a large cocoa-nut into a glass dish, and serve with cream, preserves, jellies or jams.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but it depends entirely on the coconut being fresh, which is the part a nineteenth-century cook took for granted and a modern one has to work at.
- The hinge: a fresh nutThis dish is grated coconut and nothing else, so a dry or fermented nut ruins it outright. Shake before buying — you should hear liquid sloshing — and reject any with damp, mouldy or soft eyes.
- Opening itPierce the softest of the three eyes with a screwdriver or skewer and drain the water, then tap the nut around its equator with the back of a heavy knife or a hammer until it splits. Baking the drained halves at 350F for 10–15 minutes shrinks the flesh and helps it release from the shell.
- GratingPare off the brown testa with a vegetable peeler or the meat will look grey rather than white. A box grater on the coarse side gives the flaked, snowy effect the name promises; a food processor tends to produce damp crumbs.
- Not desiccated coconutBagged sweetened or desiccated coconut is a different product — dried, often sugared, and sometimes treated with propylene glycol to keep it soft. It will not read as snow. Frozen grated coconut, sold in South and Southeast Asian groceries, is a reasonable substitute.
- "Cocoa-nut"The nineteenth-century spelling reflects a persistent confusion with cacao; it means coconut throughout this book and has nothing to do with chocolate.
- CreamPeriod cream was unhomogenised and would have been rich, broadly comparable to modern heavy or double cream. Pour it over unwhipped and unsweetened — if preserves are served alongside, they supply the sugar.
- Yield and servingOne large coconut grates to roughly 3 to 4 cups, enough for about six as a light dessert. Grate it close to serving; the flesh dries out and dulls within a day or so.
Coconut moved from luxury to commonplace in American kitchens across the second half of the nineteenth century, as steam shipping shortened the run from the Caribbean and Central America to Gulf and Atlantic ports. Before that, a whole nut was a curiosity worth serving in a glass dish so the whiteness showed; by the 1880s Southern cookbooks are thick with coconut cakes, custards and puddings, and the shredded, packaged product had begun to appear commercially. The Dixie Cook Book appears to place this among the fruits rather than the desserts, which if so would be telling — the grated nut treated as a fruit course, dressed at the table with whatever preserves the household had put up. The name looks to be simply descriptive, and may belong to a family of period dish names (snowballs, snowdrift cake, mountains of snow) that traded on white sugar and white coconut as evidence of a well-supplied larder.