Cocoa Nut Cream

History

Cocoa Nut Cream is a frozen coconut cream that appears among the ice-cream recipes in Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife, first published in 1824. The dish is a plain preparation: grated fresh coconut worked into sweetened cream and frozen. Its documented significance is bibliographic rather than social. The Virginia House-Wife is widely regarded as the first regional American cookbook and is credited with containing the first ice-cream recipe published by an American author, so Cocoa Nut Cream sits among the earliest coconut ice creams printed in the United States. Its author, Mary Randolph (1762-1828), was a Virginian who ran a Richmond boarding house before moving to Washington. Beyond its appearance in this book, the record does not document an earlier lineage for the dish, a geographic journey, or any particular social status attached to it.

Ingredients

• 1 whole coconut
• 1 quart cream
• sugar

Instructions

1. Take the nut from its shell, pare it, and grate it very fine.
2. Mix it with a quart of cream, sweeten, and freeze it.
3. If the nut be a small one, it will require one and a half to flavour a quart of cream.