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Cocoanut Balls
One cupful of butter, two cupfuls of sugar, three cupfuls of flour, two eggs, one cocoanut grated fine, drop on tins, dip finger in water and flatten; then cut and sprinkle sugar over the top; bake.
A plain butter-and-coconut drop cookie with no leavening and no stated oven temperature, written for a cook who already knew what such a dough should look like. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven guidance at all, only "bake." A modern equivalent would be around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are pale gold and the centres set. These are rich enough to darken fast on the bottom; a light-coloured sheet or a second sheet underneath helps.
- The coconutOne fresh coconut, grated fine, yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of loose meat. Substitute about 3 cups unsweetened desiccated or finely shredded coconut. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the cookies cloying alongside the two cups of sugar already in the dough.
- No leavening is intentionalThere is no soda, baking powder or cream of tartar here. The eggs and creamed butter do all the lifting, so the result is dense and short rather than cakey. Cream the butter and sugar thoroughly and beat in the eggs before the flour goes in.
- The dough will be stiffOne cup butter, two eggs and three cups flour plus the coconut gives a heavy dough closer to a rolled cookie than a batter. If it will not drop from a spoon, work it with the hands and press portions onto the sheet, then flatten with a wet finger as directed.
- "Then cut" is ambiguousAfter flattening, the instruction to cut has no clear referent in the original. It most likely means trimming or scoring the flattened rounds to even them; some readings take it as dividing larger flattened sheets of dough into squares. Either way, nothing is lost by shaping the balls to size and skipping it.
- Butter and sugar measuresOne cupful of butter is 8 oz, two sticks. An unqualified "sugar" in American recipes of this kind generally means granulated white sugar; brown or powdered is normally named.
- YieldExpect about four dozen cookies of roughly walnut size.
Grated coconut moved from a luxury to a staple of American home baking in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when steamships brought whole nuts north in quantity and packaged shredded coconut appeared in grocers' stock. Before that a cook working with coconut faced the whole job: cracking the shell, prying out the meat, paring off the brown skin and grating it on a hand grater; recipes of this era commonly measure by "one cocoanut" rather than by cupfuls, which may well reflect that labour. Sweets like these belonged to the afternoon tea table and the church supper rather than to the family dinner, and their terseness assumes a reader who needed the proportions and nothing more.