No. 36

To Prepare Cocoanut

Preparation de la Noix de Coco

Break a cocoanut across in two, exactly in the center; slip the blade of a thin round-tipped knife between the nut and the shell, push it in with the right hand and turn the cocoa with the left; detach and take out the entire half nut; remove the outer skin covering the nut with a vegetable knife (Fig. 156), and when it is all peeled, throw the nut into cold water; drain and scrape it on a coarse grater. Use a part of it for roasting by putting the grated nut on a sheet of paper into a moderate oven and keep the remainder into a stone jar in the ice-box mixing it with an equal weight of sugar.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's method still works, and it produces fresher coconut than anything in a bag. A few points on vessels, temperatures and keeping.

Drain it firstPierce the soft eye at the stem end (there are three, but usually only one gives) and pour off the water before you break the shell, or you will lose it across the counter. The water is worth saving for drinking or for a sorbet base.
Breaking it "exactly in the center"Tap firmly around the nut's equator with the back of a heavy knife or a hammer, rotating as you go; it will split along that line rather than shatter. A short spell in a 350F oven, ten to fifteen minutes, loosens the meat from the shell and makes the knife work much easier.
"A moderate oven"Around 350F; a period "moderate" oven covers roughly 325 to 375F. Spread the grated coconut thinly on parchment rather than plain paper and watch it from about six minutes on to brown patchily and then burn quickly; stir once or twice and pull it when it is the color of straw.
The cold water bathAfter peeling off the brown testa, the soak in cold water rinses away shell dust and seems to firm the meat for grating; Ranhofer does not say why he calls for it. Drain it well; wet coconut clogs a grater and will not toast.
GratingA coarse grater; the coarse face of a modern box grater will serve. A food processor with the shredding disc does the same job in seconds, though the shreds are shorter and less good for garnish.
The sugar preservationAn equal weight of sugar is a preservative, not a seasoning: it ties up the moisture that would otherwise let mold set in. Treat the result as a sweetened ingredient and reduce the sugar elsewhere in whatever you use it for. Refrigerated it keeps a week or two; the freezer is better, and unsweetened grated coconut freezes well for months.
YieldOne medium coconut gives roughly 3 to 4 cups of loosely packed gratings, about 10 to 12 oz by weight. Buy one that is heavy for its size and sloshes when shaken; a dry-sounding nut is already old.
Stone jar, ice-boxAny nonreactive covered container in the refrigerator. Glazed stoneware was the standard keeping vessel of the period, and it does not absorb fat or pass on flavors.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of more than thirty years associated with Delmonico's in New York, though his service there was broken rather than continuous, and the Elementary Methods section is essentially the training manual he gave his kitchen: how to line a mold, how to color a sauce, how to break a coconut. That a great French-American restaurant kitchen needed written instructions for coconut says something about the period. Desiccated coconut had only become a commercial article in the United States in the later nineteenth century, and the packaged sweetened shred that later filled American cake recipes was not yet something a first-class kitchen would rely on. Ranhofer's split some toasted at once, the rest packed under sugar against the ice is the standard preindustrial answer to a perishable fatty ingredient, and it is the same logic behind sugared candied peel and preserved fruit elsewhere in the book.