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. Remove the coconut from its shell and pare away the outer brown skin. Grate the white flesh very fine. Mix the grated coconut with one quart of cream and sweeten to taste. Freeze the mixture until set. If using a small coconut, you may need one and a half nuts to adequately flavor a quart of cream.