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Cocoanut Drops
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
To one grated cocoanut, add half its weight of sugar and the white of one egg, cut to a stiff froth; mix thoroughly and drop on buttered white paper or tin sheets. Bake fifteen minutes.
A three-ingredient macaroon that depends entirely on the coconut being fresh and moist. The proportions are given by weight, which is the most useful thing about the recipe and the easiest thing to get wrong.
- One grated cocoanutA whole fresh coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of grated meat, about 10-12 oz. Half its weight in sugar is therefore around 5-6 oz, or three-quarters of a cup. Weigh rather than guess, since the whole recipe hangs on that ratio.
- Fresh versus packaged coconutBagged sweetened flake is both drier and already sugared; using it with the full sugar quantity gives a cloying, sandy drop. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is the closer substitute, and it benefits from being moistened before mixing.
- One egg white may not bind itA single white will barely hold 10 oz of coconut together. If the mixture will not clump when squeezed in the hand, add a second white beaten stiff, a spoonful at a time, until it just coheres.
- Cut to a stiff frothWhisk the white to firm peaks. The recipe says to mix thoroughly; folding rather than stirring will preserve a little more of the froth, though a coconut drop is dense in any case.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven guidance at all; 325F is a reasonable modern setting. Anything hotter browns the exposed coconut shreds well before the interior sets.
- Buttered paperParchment does the job with no butter at all, and releases the drops cleanly. On a bare buttered sheet the sugar caramelises against the metal and the bottoms stick.
- Fifteen minutesFifteen minutes at 325F is about right for walnut-sized drops; look for tipped shreds just turning gold and edges set while the centres are still soft. Let them cool on the sheet before lifting, since they firm as they cool.
- YieldAbout two dozen drops from one coconut. They keep for several days in a tin and dry out after that.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women and sold for charity, which is why this recipe carries Mrs. P. B. Ayer's name and almost no instruction: it was written by a cook for cooks who already knew what a macaroon should look like. The spelling "cocoanut" was standard in nineteenth-century American cookbooks and persisted well into the twentieth. Whole coconuts reached inland cities like Chicago in quantity only after rail and steamship traffic with the Caribbean became routine, and grating one by hand was laborious work. Sweetened shredded coconut sold in packages came later; a cook of this period started with the husked nut, the milk drained off, and a box grater.