Thwack! The quick rush of air from the cutlass, brought down with force and speed, ruffled my hair. It was the only breeze on the inferno-like street in downtown Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad and Tobago — land of my paternal ancestors.
The man with the machete grinned and held out the large green coconut he had decapitated for me, making chopping motions around its crown to pierce a hole through which I could sip the water inside.
As I sipped, letting the cool, slightly sweet water slip easily down my throat, the vendor lifted another green coconut — roughly the size of a soccer ball — and went to work again, deftly turning the coconut in his palm as he brought the cutlass down upon its crown (the capped area where the coconut had been attached to the tree). It is a skill that has fascinated and terrified me ever since I first saw my father making short work of a coconut the same way when I was just 5 years old.
The coconut, which is native to tropical climates like that of Trinidad, grows on the coconut palm tree, which bears fruit year-round. Its ready availability makes it a staple ingredient in the cuisines of South Asia, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, where it is used in rice, curries, and soups as well as sweets.
Coconut was also used, albeit sparingly, in the southern American colonies, arriving as whole mature coconut on trade ships bringing sugar, spices, and slaves from the Caribbean. But it was its wider introduction by Franklin Baker Sr. to the city of Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century that catapulted coconut into the limelight.
One of these nuts is a meal for a man, both meat and drink.
— Marco Polo
By the 1890s, Philadelphia had already enjoyed a near two-hundred-year history as a metropolis of gastronomic delights. Food companies had long sought to situate their businesses in the city as a way of giving their products the imprimatur of gourmet quality. Chief among Philadelphia’s food manufacturers was a brotherhood of flour millers, large and small, many of whom hailed from families who had plied their trade since the 1700s.
Franklin Baker Sr. was a newcomer to the business when he started his flour milling outfit in 1897. By then, Philadelphia had long yielded its dominance in milling to the great mills cropping up in the American Midwest. But Baker, then 22 years old, was an entrepreneur, so he expanded his small operations overseas in hopes of capturing business from the growing market in Cuba.
For a time things went well. That is, until the day that his ship returned from Cuba not with cash for his flour but with a hold full of fresh coconuts. Bananas or citrus or rum would have been easy to unload, as they were in high demand. Instead, Baker found himself stuck with an unusable product that no one wanted, not even the lone merchant who was known for selling coconuts from his shop in the city. Even he was in the midst of closing up his shop on Arch Street for good.
Unable to unload the strange fruit, Baker made a decision that many would call further folly: he bought the Arch Street coconut works and figured out a method to dry and grate the white-fleshed coconut before the shipment spoiled.
What Mr. Baker did next would change the face of American baked goods — and the future of coconut — forever. He gave away his dried coconut product to home cooks and professional chefs to try out. Within 5 years, his sales of coconut were so strong that he sold his flour business and focused entirely on coconut, relocating the manufacturing plant to bigger facilities in Brooklyn, New York, and, later, Hoboken, New Jersey.
Within 10 years, Baker’s Coconut was so universally accepted that coconut layer cake, coconut cream pie, and coconut custard were rapidly becoming classic American desserts — with a particularly strong following in the American South, the one area of the country that had some history with coconut. Now called Baker’s Angel Flake Sweetened Coconut, Baker’s folly is, today, the recognized standard in dried sweetened coconut for desserts and baking in America and around the world.
Even up to the time of my own childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, coconut remained entrenched in the realm of confection — at least for Americans. But in our own New York City home, my father often had a whole dry coconut on the counter or a bowl of freshly grated coconut meat waiting for use. In those days, this was no mean feat — my dad had to trek to the far recesses of West Indian Brooklyn to procure it. Back then, coconut — usually shredded and sweetened — only made cameo appearances in desserts in America. For coconut purists like my father, the sweetened “angel flakes” à la Mr. Baker were not considered “the real thing.”
Thanks to my dad, and our family visits to Trinidad, I learned early on that a coconut starts as a large green nut filled with liquid and a thick jelly. As the coconut matures and dries out, the jelly becomes the hard white flesh that my friends back home thought was the sum total of the fruit (if they even knew what real coconut looked like at all). It’s only when the green casing is cracked open that the brown shell is revealed, complete with the raffia-like threads that we see on coconuts in the supermarket.
Today coconut is no longer exotic and rare. My specialized knowledge of the fruit I love so well isn’t nearly so unusual or strange. Instead, coconut has become a mainstream flavor and, in many cases, a go-to ingredient for healthy eaters who appreciate coconut’s nutrient density and low glycemic index, and for foodies who are eager to explore a world full of flavor. While fresh coconut was once a rarity in the supermarket, there is now a great variety of coconut products — from waters to milks, chips, shreds, sugars, oils, molasses, vinegar, flour, and more.
Thanks to its mild, sweet taste, it is easy to incorporate coconut into a variety of dishes to take advantage of its well-touted health benefits. Here I’ve collected recipes from a number of cultures that have had a long and fruitful relationship with the coconut, highlighting its versatility and easy adaptation to the modern kitchen.
Thanks to its mild, sweet taste, it is easy to incorporate coconut into a variety of dishes to take advantage of its well-touted health benefits.
Long-distance athletes were the first to recognize coconut water as an electrolyte drink because of its high levels of potassium, but cultures with a strong relationship to the fruit have long known that is not all that coconut has to offer. While sweet, coconut has a low glycemic index, meaning that it does not substantially raise blood sugar when consumed — a boon for diabetics or those watching their weight.
Coconut oil. While coconut oil does indeed comprise saturated fat, the fat is primarily in the form of medium-chain fatty acids, which are more easily digested by the liver and converted to energy rather than fat stores. As such, they may prove beneficial in promoting heart health. Researchers since the 1930s have observed that people in coconut-consuming cultures tended to have lower rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes despite the fat content of this staple food. Numerous modern studies have shown that countries with coconut-heavy diets have the lowest incidence of heart disease, particularly as compared to Americans.
And despite its high saturated fat levels, coconut oil seems to actually promote “good” HDL cholesterol levels, as noted by the Harvard School of Public Health, while promoting the satiety necessary to maintain healthy weight levels. Coconut enjoys the added boon for the health-conscious eater or active exerciser of being real, simple, pure, and natural.
For thousands of years, Ayurvedic practitioners have recommended coconut oil for dental health in the form of “oil pulling,” in which pure coconut oil is swished around the mouth to kill bacteria and soothe the gums. Today the practice is widely resurging. Scientists now know that both the lauric and caprylic acids naturally found in coconut oil are powerful antimicrobials that can help alleviate gingivitis and bad breath caused by bacteria. Studies have shown that these antimicrobials are also an effective preventive against candida or yeast infections.
Pure coconut oil is a treasured part of beauty rituals and is massaged into the scalp to alleviate headaches and make hair shine, as well as into the body to make skin supple and ease swelling in the joints. Coconut oil is considered particularly useful for erasing stretch marks as well. In mass-produced cosmetics, coconut oil is a mild and nonallergenic base for lipsticks, eyeliners, shampoos, and more. As a pure acne treatment, coconut oil is touted for its antimicrobial properties.
Coconut water. If the ancient lore of coconut-producing countries is to be believed, coconut water is good for everything from alleviating nausea in pregnant women to keeping the undernourished alive — and it continues to be used for these purposes throughout India, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.
Coconut flour. Those on gluten-free diets will find naturally gluten-free coconut flour a health powerhouse. While it can’t be used in a one-to-one replacement ratio with wheat flour, when combined with oat flour or other gluten-free flours, it provides, taste, texture, and flavor without gluten or high sugar levels.
Numerous modern studies have shown that countries with coconut-heavy diets have the lowest incidence of heart disease.
Luckily, everyday supermarkets are stocking an increasing variety of canned, frozen, packaged, and prepared products, and even coconuts with prescored shells, making cooking with coconuts easy. Rest assured that even dyed-in-the-wool coconut connoisseurs use a mixture of both fresh and packaged goods, all of which we will explore in the recipes that follow.
As you make some of these recipes, you will enjoy learning the differences in texture and taste between fresh coconut, dried coconut, and coconut chips, and you will revel in the creaminess of coconut milks and ice creams while marveling at how refined coconut oil — flavorless and not greasy — is the perfect frying medium. You will also delight in the new levels of complexity and flavor your baked goods, smoothies, desserts, and drinks reach with coconut sugar and syrups.
Once the recipes in this book become part of your repertoire, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without a full pantry of coconut delights.